there's nothing we can do

I sit at the window, listening to distant commonplace noises, worrying about commonplace things and a bee floats by, lazily, its wings moving so fast, they barely move at all.

The bees.  I wonder if we’ll remember that they were the first to go.  I was always a curious little thing, plagued with boredom, poking into every mystery I could find in the vast wonderland that was the childhood backyard in which I spent most of my young years.  More than once, the mysteries that I so eagerly poked and prodded contained a growing nest or a rich hive and I was sent quickly away, yelping in pain and covered in stinging needles. My mother would slather me with cream and assure me that bee stings were good for you. “They prevent arthritis when you get older,” she would say.  

But this bee that floats lazily and whose wings move so quickly they seem to not move at all, is the first bee I’ve seen in close to a year. 

But there’s nothing we can do.

I will remember the leaves I danced through as a blissfully ignorant child.  The cool water of the lakes my young friends and I would swim through, and that smell that came from the lake that smelled like summer and picnics.  The clean country air that we breathed as we ran at breakneck speeds, chasing each other through the tall grass that whipped and scratched our bare legs.  I will remember this when the world is nothing but ash and waste. I must remember, because I will have to tell our children stories of a world they will never see.

What a shame.  Still, there’s nothing we can do.

Come some time, we will look back on faded photographs singed with time, on autumn leaves and mountains and the kind of open air that gave you hope and all hope will be lost within us because the edges of the photographs decompose in poisonous air.  We can barely breathe as we speak. Our skin burns and we cannot remember the sky. 

The world burns, us along with it and there’s nothing we can do.

But rich men lie, smug in their cozy graves lined with gold and the sweat of others, oblivious to our pain.

And there’s nothing we can do.

When I was younger, they used to ask me if I wanted children, or if I would ever consider having one. They don’t ask anymore.  What pain the little thing would go through. I already love it too much to cause it such despair.  

If only there was something we could do.