Salted Water
Brianna Wright
Salted water makes its way towards the corners of my mouth, sliding down my cheeks like sparkling pearls. These gems sting my eyes and I blink to rid myself of them.
Each tear is my connection fading away. My connection with nature, the stars, the sea – dissolving away into millions of pieces. I cry a thousand oceans in sorrow of what mankind has become.
We are separated from our ancestor species, hiding away in sprawling cities while our closest relatives die from our own selfishness. We steal land that is not ours, cheating its rightful owners, destroying their homes and imprisoning them in cages to be ridiculed and jeered at until the end of their days.
We are barbaric. We are tyrants. And it saddens me. People often believe I am weird, going through a “phase” which I will grow out of in the end so that I can be a productive asset to the economy. I do not care about the economy, or trivial political matters. Humanity is not a “phase”. It is a disappearing trait slowly suffocated by modern life, pressed into the ground like a flower in a book. A flower… Nature again. I cry some more.
I cry for unborn generations – generations who may never experience the joy of seeing a bud about to blossom, or green shoots escaping the imprisonment of winter trees, or butterflies flapping their wings to the melodies that birds sing. I cry because my children may only know concrete and the mantra, “If it’s green, it’s got to go!” They may be brainwashed to believe that grass, or trees, or flowers, or bushes, or wildlife are nothing but a myth. That humans and cities are the only things to ever have existed and that anything opposing these beliefs is dangerous and harmful to social stability.
I cry for the world. Not the world we think is ours, but the world beneath the mountains of commercialism, which is now decaying with the rot of corruption.