Era of Less

The air on the motorway carries it before you see anything: hot tarmac, dry grass, and under that the thin sweetness of something burning that no one lit on purpose. A yellow aircraft banks low over the carriageway and lets its load fall along the verge, and the traffic moves on through the spray as though this were ordinary now. Perhaps it is. You find yourself watching it almost calmly, because the thing you spent years dreading is no longer somewhere ahead of you. It has arrived, on this road, this afternoon, and the strange discovery is how quiet that feels.

The fear used to be a private weather system, carried through office corridors and supermarket queues and the blue glow of a screen at midnight. Now the fire has come off the forecast and onto the road, and the grief that travels with it has nowhere left to hide. And yet a thought surfaces that is almost relief: that less of everything might not be the catastrophe it was always said to be, that the years ahead may ask only to be lived through, smaller and more awake than before. This is for wound-bearers who have stopped waiting for the emergency to arrive, because it already has, and who are learning what there is to be said for having less. Let it play low, and let the quiet after it stay.