We Are...

• Katrina Sugars, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2010

We are the passion and the raw emotion. We are the pride and the strength. We are the liberated and the wild. The untamed spirit and the savage beauty are ours. Rolling mountains and rivers and valleys surround us. Our lives are ruled by pure instinct and need. We possess no belongings or regrets. We are the freedom they desire.

They are the restrictions; the girth and the saddle and the reins that control us. They are the boundaries; the fences and the yards and the stalls that enclose us. They are greed and want and power. Instead of living harmoniously with the lands they fight them; destroy what was there before them. Everything must be bigger and better or faster and stronger. All power is controlled, harnessed for their purposes. They crave what they cannot have so they steal it from others.

We are the beaten, the broken and the down. Squashed together, contained by hard rails on all sides. We are the panicked eyes and the terrified screams. We are the doomed and the destroyed. Horror and fear exude from us like sweat. There is no hope, no life beyond this.
She is not like them. She is the quiet and the calm. The softness and the love we need. Surely she can save us. She is the new surroundings spreading endlessly around us; the escape from fear and desperation. She has freed us.