The return to Europe

*“The sea does not speak, yet it says everything. I watched the waves rise and break beneath the dusk sky, and it struck me—this same sea touched the shores of the Holy Land, where I knelt in blood and ash, and now it laps the coasts of a world I no longer know how to return to.
What is a man who has seen the bones of saints shattered, who has held both relic and dying child in the same arms?
I thought we were sent to redeem Jerusalem. But did Jerusalem not come to redeem us?

And now, with salt on my lips and silence in my heart, I ask—
Can a soul unlearn the sword? Can a hand once trained for killing be retrained for peace?
The world behind me is burning. The world ahead is indifferent. And here I stand, between them,
not a hero… only a man.”*