Love stews in wartime. It cooks all that peace discards.

We’re on the cutting board. There’s no fruit – only rocks.

A friend picks up a helmet from the sidewalk. 

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“What rank do you think he was?” she asks, not lifting her gaze from the green shell. 

A soldier without his helmet is a baby without mother’s breast. We squeeze the skin and run our palms across smooth curves, but there’s no juice. 

Her fruit had run dry. 

In Karvachar, everyone is searching for their mother.
I wondered if the boy saw her, when his head left his body. 

I say nothing.

In Stepanakert, a soldier gives us his room, to sleep in his car. “I always end up there, anyway.” 

At 10 p.m., he strolls in with a smile, carrying fresh matnakash — that finger-pulling bread — and a head of lamb. The smell made my stomach turn. 

Haven’t we sacrificed enough?  

A man stands inside what used to be his store. 

“I burned it down,” he says, a stone marking the spot where a mother once held a face. “So that they wouldn’t have it.” 

Later, when a woman’s hands strum a guitar and the milk pours out, his hands dig into the blade of a pocket knife, to cut the stream of tears.

His eyes are still burning.

Home exists in the sockets, which hold all they have ever seen — until the end. No time line, no war zone. 

Back to the cutting board, where a father buries hope in his hands, flanked by the sun.

The body is built on, above, under, inside war.
Time sneaks in and out of his walls. 

How clever, Armenian is. պատերազմ | war.
Through him, a wall. (պատ | paat or baad)

The doors of Gandzasar monastery (Photo by the author)

War builds and tears  — sifting sand and shifting tide because cliffs will not budge. Here, no one escapes the mountains. The soldier boys know this. I have read it in the tunnels of their eyes.

In a morgue, outside the hotel, a father scrolls through images of someone’s dead boy — but not his. “I don’t know which is worse — finding him here or never knowing.” 

In Artsakh, our hands never skimp. We cup hope like balls of kufte  — knuckles smashing against ribs, flicking water on lips  — but her insides withered long ago. Only a green shell remains. 

A seed is enough to hope, says peace. 

What does she know? She’s never felt the tremors of a heart snap — or watched meat knead itself into a mountain.

Love in wartime is communion, not as play, but survival. Flesh and blood are not metaphor.

Love in wartime is driving off, to save the body, while dousing your soul in the flames.

Love in wartime is scoring bread into ashes, broken helmets, lost sons — because peace is greedy, and war wants love, too. At any cost.

Lilly Torosyan is editor of the Armenian Weekly and a member of the Armenian Nutmegger community. (That’s Connecticut nutmegs by way of Sasun walnuts). Her writing focuses on the confluence of identity, cultural continuity and language – especially within the global Armenian communities. She previously served as the assistant project manager at h-pem, an Armenian cultural platform launched by the Hamazkayin Central Executive Board, and a freelance writer in Armenia.

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