Cut’s free.
Those I love and fought for are free.
Feeling more animal than human, I had no control as I crawled on all fours to the water’s edge. My hands squelched through the mud, moving like a beast. I gasped as I traded land for icy water. Waist deep then chest. I kept going until the mud switched to silt, welcoming rather than preventing.
I kept going.
Leaving ground and gravity, I slipped into weightless swimming.
I didn’t try to stay on the surface. The moment I couldn’t feel the bottom beneath my shoes, I let go. I sank below, dunking into the cold darkness.
I ran from everything, hiding in the pond.
Holding my breath, the freezing temperature stole my pain and hunger, soaking through my blood-saturated jeans and cinder-coated jumper.
With water above and all around me, I opened my mouth and screamed.
I screamed and screamed.
I screamed so fucking loud.
I screamed for my father, my mother, my sister and brothers.
I screamed for myself.
Bubbles flew from my mouth.
Salty tears mingled with fresh water and frogs sped away from my emotional unravelling.
I screamed and yelled and cursed and shouted and only the depth could hear me.
I poured forth my despair, my guilt, my condition, my fever, my battle-worn body.
I sank deeper and deeper, permitting my liquid-logged clothes to take me to the murky bottom. Plant fronds tickled my ankles, bubbles erupted from my shirt, and my hands hovered in front of my face, white as death and just as cold.
I focused on my heartbeat—the only noise in the cavernous body of water. As seconds ticked on, it slowed...it steadied; it finally found its own rhythm away from tonight’s atrocities.
Down there, I found something I’d been missing.
Forgiveness.
Only once my lungs burst for air did I kick off my shoes and push off the bottom. The rush of water over my skin washed me clean—not just from tonight but from everything. I hadn’t done it out of fun. I’d done it out of loyalty to those who needed to be fought for.
I wasn’t vindictive or spiteful.
I wasjustified.
I was baptised anew.
Breaking the surface, I gulped in greedy breaths, feeling a sense of rebirth. My tiredness faded, my wounds numbed, and I swam to look back the way I’d come.
There, on the horizon, the angry reds, yellows, and ochres of a raging fire danced in the dark night sky. Smoke stole the Milky Way and fire cleansed Hawksridge.
I hung in the snowy embrace of the water, just watching, always watching.
I shivered. My teeth chattered. And I craved warmth and bed and Nila.
I’d done what I needed to even though it almost broke me.
