Nethumya Jayawickrama, Sri Lanka's National Honour
October 2026
THE CAUSE
They told me
a cause was a fire.
Something worth carrying
through the dark.
So I brought it wood.
First, my time.
Then my sleep.
Then the small, inconvenient truths
I had once called
my own.
I brought my questions too,
though they warned me
questions made the flame
burn unevenly.
So I learned.
I learned which doubts
to swallow.
Which names
to forget.
Which wounds
to call necessary.
When my friends disappeared,
I told myself
they had simply
stopped believing.
When another chair
stood empty,
I called it sacrifice.
When the fire reached
my hands,
I called the pain
proof.
That is the clever thing
about devotion—
it teaches you
to rename what hurts.
A cage becomes duty.
Silence becomes discipline.
Obedience becomes faith.
And the longer you stay,
the more frightening
the door becomes.
So I stayed.
I fed the fire
until there was nothing left
in my pockets,
nothing left
in my hands,
nothing left
that still knew
my name.
Then, one morning,
the fire went out.
No trumpet.
No victory.
No voice from the smoke
telling me
I had been worth the cost.
Just ash.
Ash where my hours had been.
Ash where my questions
had burned.
Ash where I had once
stood so proudly
and called myself loyal.
I waited for the cause
to speak.
It didn't.
Of course it didn't.
A cause has no heartbeat.
No hands.
No grave to visit.
It cannot thank you
for dying for it.
It can only continue
without you.
And suddenly
I understood the betrayal
was never that it had abandoned me.
It was that I had spent so long
protecting something
that never needed
to know my name.
I had mistaken
being useful
for being loved.
So now,
when someone tells me
there is something
worth dying for,
I ask a different question:
**What is it worth
if it needs me dead
to prove that it matters?**
And if the answer
is silence,
I walk away.
Not because
I stopped believing.
But because
I finally remembered
I was never born
to be fuel.
Score: 70.35 out of 100.
Read the October 2026 National Honours