📸 Once, they were framed in a photograph—his uniform crisp, his posture steady, her arm resting on him with love that seemed unshakable. It was the picture of forever, of a promise stronger than distance or danger.

⏳ Eleven months later, he returned. Not in a flag-draped coffin, but alive. And yet… not the same. His body thinner, his face hollow, his eyes carrying shadows too heavy for words. She rushed to him, wrapped him in the same arms that once held certainty—now holding fragments of what war had shattered.

🕯️ “There was no sky,” he whispered. “Only walls. Only cold water. Only silence that screamed.” Captivity had ended, but the prison had followed him home. At night, darkness swallowed him whole. Loud noises froze his breath. In the mirror, he saw not a soldier, not a husband, but a prisoner who never left the cell.

❤️ She offered everything she had—her touch, her patience, her presence. But each time she reached for him, the answer came, muffled by pain:
“Don’t come in. I’m still there.”

⚔️ Some battles end when the war is over. Others keep fighting inside the soul, unseen and endless. Survival is not always living. And love, no matter how fierce, cannot always unlock the door.