That day was the first time we’d tasted freedom.
tom
The camp we were in had been abandoned, our captors fleeing as they learnt their war was lost. Our freedom therefore was not granted exuberantly by some foreign saviours but by our gradual realisation that the watchtowers were empty.
Reasoning it was another cruel trick we took a full day to venture from our quarters into the main yard. Even longer before we felt brave enough to break into the kitchens and the guards quarters. It took a week before anyone thought to venture beyond the barbed wire.
It was Johnson who did it first, standing dumbly on the other side of the fence while we watched him silently, waiting for the fearful crack of a rifle that never came.
We joined him.
We gazed wide-eyed at the expanse before us. That land we had glimpsed, dissected into small digestible squares through the chain link, overcame us in it's vastness.
Slowly, one by one, we returned back to the camp.
Freedom, it turns out, is an acquired taste; highly seasoned and confronting to bland senses. For us who had never sampled it's rich and heady nature, it was simply unpalatable.