GAIA

The morning dew collected on her arms as she sat and watched the darkness filter into a sunrise.

The time between the fading darkness and the new dawn was where she found her solace. It was the only time she could let herself settle, like soil on the bottom of a riverbank. It was the only time she could sit on a moss-laden rock, gaze out into the world, and think of her children.

She loved them unconditionally, but she hated them conditionally. It was a glaring contradiction that ran towards her at Godspeed.

They grew, as children did, with wide-eyed curiosity. Amazed at the world she held in the palm of her hand; brave enough to venture out into the wilderness she so loved –and they were of a different world.

But then, like all children, they grew up. They became accustomed to the greying dizziness of the industrial world. No longer were they dependent on her; on the emerald grasses and whispering woods that fed their imagination. No longer did they fear her world, with its gaping ravines and glorious, towering forests.

There came a time when the baby birds flew free from their nests, venturing out into a brave new world. Her children flew, with their wings spread wide and their eyes beyond the horizon. But in doing so, they hurt her.

They loved her, but they hurt her.

They hurt her until her breaths were too difficult to wheeze out of her eroded chest.

They wanted to protect their mother, as children did. It was a promise etched in blood and sealed upon conception. Time, that wretched ingrate, led them to forget their promises. The vow of protection was quickly replaced with other matters that seemed trivial to her. Every second of their lives had been mapped; they yearned for the world like the young always did, and then hated it as their skin wrinkled and their hairs greyed.

They respected her, but they dismissed her. Even when she exploded in a fit of rage, her displeasure a hurricane of torment. Even when she cried and rained down hell like black ash upon them, they disregarded her. Her laments were met with a splash of pity that was soon replaced by indifference. They moved past her anger, as if they had seen it more than a hundred times before.

Her children were nothing if not resilient. They were their mother in all the ways she did not want them to be.

They were intelligent. They wanted her world to be their own. She humoured them at first, as any mother did, when small ones expressed their innocent ambitions. In time, however, she realised that ambition had given way to greed. It was a greed so powerful she was powerless to stop it.

They swept into her green wonderlands, where emerald leaves collected effervescent dewdrops in the morning chill and disappeared before noon. They destroyed her picture-perfect forests little by little, until the remnant leaves were coated in dust, grey from the smoke that rained down in a swirl of ash. In rare glimpses of humanity, they tried to save that which was dying – sometimes to no avail.

They created magnificent machines; metal demons that bled her dry, and mercurial contraptions that broke her heart. She felt at times, as if she were close to death. As if she were just on the cusp of joining hands with the Grim Reaper, at the precipice between life and death.

She loved her children, but not enough to die for them.

And so, she fought back in a silent rage, as mothers did. She made her children suffer through heat that was both unprecedented and unbearable. She made her children shiver in the cold when they were unused to it. She melted the glaciers that stood between them until they finally noticed that she was in pain.

When would she gain back their love for her?

She could see it in fleeting glimpses; there were remnants of care left in some of her children. A softness blurred their normally hard edges.

She wept in the night-time, screaming into the starry void that was the sky. Spent. Exhausted. Drained.

“I will soon die.” She once said aloud, to nothing and no one.

She could feel it in her bones. Death did not chase her. Instead, it walked beside her as a sympathetic companion on the road to her doom.

When the trees withered and grew no more. When the riverbeds dried and could not resume to rushing and tinkling sounds of flowing water. When the icebergs melted and no longer stood strong like mountains. When her creatures did not have a home and would vanish into in recesses of history. That was when she would die.

She could only wonder how long it would take for her children to push her past the point of no return.