Drabble 164 – Celerity

I’ve thought a lot about wilderness over the past few weeks, about open spaces and their rarity, about climate change, the imagined version of my future, and how that’s changing every day. I’m lucky to live where I do; I take long walks with my friends, finding lakes we didn’t know existed. I have mountains on one side, saltwater on the other. I’ve seen deer casually stroll out from the woods behind my house, and all day I get to enjoy birdsong. It’s easy to pretend that my impact on the world doesn’t matter when I’m surrounded by so much natural beauty. But it does matter, and as I grow increasingly conscious of that, I mull over other questions.

What would the world look like, what would it feel like, if it was more empty than I could ever imagine it?

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

CELERITY

(n.) from Latin celer for “fast, swift”

Swiftness of movement.

All spaces are her spaces, now.

She was sad about it. Is sad about it, in fact, but there’s a joy there, freedom, something she didn’t, couldn’t feel when roads and tracks and neat, tidy borders governed her life. She sprints through back yards, through spaces once belonging to the city, through shopping malls and industrial complexes and a military base, ignoring posted signs because they mean nothing anymore. 

She wishes, sometimes, that somebody would stop her. That someone might point a gun at her, or a knife, and say, “You can’t, this is mine.”

But there is no “mine,” not when there is only her.