Brooke Forbes

 I drove past a Mparntwe grass fire;

scolded earth, smouldering fallen trees and spitting flames thrown forward into an ashy air. 

Birds soared and I gave thought to animal homes ruined, and the regeneration that needed to take place.

As I drove through a landscape thick with smoke I wasn’t thinking about my own safety; I turned my head towards a burning log, then darted across the road to avoid a fallen tree, ashes and discarded logs scattered, smashed into the asphalt, and instead thought about how the fire was part of me. 

It’s burning mass, it’s sacrifice, it’s evanescence.

I thought about how the tiny flames still alight are the parts of me still burning; with fear, with illness, with flashbacks to darker times. 

Times when the bright lights of a ward snuffed out any natural blaze or glory. 

Times when in protesting for my own rights I was met with a stiff back of a hand, guided forward and into a light unknown. 

Today, there was a lightness to the smoke, as I drove through the tunnel of darkness I am reminded of the natural light at the end. 

That sweet sight of freedom, perched on the edge of the Stuart Highway, beckoning me forward and into the day. 

A car goes past, then a truck, and the rolling sounds of civilisation bring me forward – I have survived, yet again, another apocalypse.