🩸The Path Beyond Return

A vow made not in words, but in the fire of choice—where silence walks beside conviction, and the road ahead answers only to the soul.

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By Carlo Lippold / Erebus83
Written: 04.08.2025
https://enlightentheday.substack.com/s/poetry

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There are moments in a life when choice ceases to be a luxury and becomes a reckoning.
When the veil of safety tears just wide enough to glimpse the cost of freedom—
not theoretical, not metaphorical, but tangible in blood, in breath, in bone.
This poem was not written to explain that choice,
but to give voice to the silence that follows after it has been made.
It is for those who walk forward knowing they may not return.
And for those who ask why—when the sky is falling—they still go.

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The Path Beyond Return

We speak of return as though it were a compass still obeying the hand that holds it,
but some paths, once chosen, consume the map entirely—
not because the way home is sealed behind us,
but because the one who left no longer exists in the shape that once was.

To walk a road knowing you may not return is not despair,
but devotion in its rawest form,
the kind of vow that outlasts applause, outlasts breath,
that lingers like blood in the soil long after the war has forgotten your name.

Freedom was never sculpted from comfort.
It is not inherited in peace, nor granted by decree.
It is carved from the marrow of those who step forward
when every instinct says to flee,
breathed into being by the ones who hold a line not for conquest,
but to prevent the world from collapsing into silence.

And still—still we live as if it were eternal,
as if peace were gravity instead of grace.
We ignore the agony at the edge of our sight
because it has not yet shattered the glass in our own windows,
because our children still wake to warmth instead of rubble.
But the mirror is patient,
and history has teeth sharper than most will admit.
When the sirens call your name,
and no hand reaches back—
you will know how apathy writes its debts in crimson ink.

So we choose.
With trembling hand or silent resolve,
we choose to walk toward the fire,
not because we wish to burn,
but because the smoke has already begun to choke the sky.

Perhaps the choice is not born of logic,
not a calculation nor creed.
Perhaps it is faith—not the kind pressed in books,
but the kind that blooms in the absence of certainty.
A deeper hunger.
A whisper from beyond the page.

And so I walk.
Not for medals, not for monument,
but because the road called my name in a language I did not learn
but somehow always knew.

Let it be said: I did not walk because I wanted to leave.
I walked because I could not stay.

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There will be those who question the decision—
those who seek a reason written in ink, or numbers, or policy.
But the truth lies not in explanation,
but in presence.
In choosing not to look away.
In standing between harm and the helpless
even when the odds no longer weigh in your favor.
And if I return, I will not be the same—
but I will return knowing I became
what the moment demanded.

If you understand, you already walk beside me.
If not, may this verse be the echo that reaches you before the fire does.