After The Collapse

Aleya was four years old when her grandmother left this world. She doesn’t remember many details about that time, but she does remember one particular afternoon with her grandmother. She recalls the usual quiver in her grandmother’s voice being replaced by one of conviction and strength. At four she did not have the language to comprehend this, but as children do, she had a strong sense of that for which there are no words. Her grandmother took Aleya’s hands in hers and said, “Aleya, people stopped listening with their hearts a long time ago. Some of them didn’t believe in the wisdom of their own heart, and they saw it merely as another organ in the body, nothing more. This is why the world I lived through has been destroyed. It was so wonderful Aleya, and I’m sorry you will not get to experience it. We failed you. We failed you all. I’m so... The next word seemed trapped behind her lips, and the quiver returned. Tears began to pour from her grandmother’s eyes, as if a faucet had been turned on inside her. They rolled down her wrinkled cheeks and onto her lap where she held Aleya’s hands.

This was Aleya’s first memory of feeling with her own heart. It was a feeling of deep sadness, and love at the same time. As her grandmother held her hands, she slipped a gold heart-shaped locket into her palm and squeezed Aleya’s fingers around it. It was a firm squeeze that matched the intensity of the words just shared. Four-year-old Aleya was quick to point out to her grandmother that the locket was empty inside. Her grandmother laughed and said, “No, no, no dear. Inside this locket is a never-ending space that holds all the love and wisdom, and you only need to be still and listen to reach it and you can access it anytime.”

Aleya, now sat holding the locket as she did every evening dreaming of the world her grandmother lived in. She wondered if there would ever be an outside world again. The Big Collapse (or the Final Collapse) occurred three years after her grandmother passed, and those who survived it were sent to live in the Centers. The outside world was no longer habitable for human life. Each individual was permitted to take two bags containing their chosen possessions, some of which was confiscated at the Centers if it was not approved of. Along with the locket, Aleya packed some of her favorite clothes; jeans, t-shirts, dungarees, an old pair of boots. She chose some pens, pencils, a journal, one doll from when she was younger, some old jewelry of her mother’s and a watch that had belonged to her father. The remaining space in her bag, she filled with books and photographs belonging to her grandmother. It is from these items that Aleya gets to experience the outside world. At fifteen years old now, she has read each book and studied each photo more than once, but she never grows tired of it, and it always seems new and fresh each time. She imagined the outside world to be that way all the time; new and fresh.

Every evening at the same time she would have what she liked to call “real time.” This is the time she would spend learning about the world her grandmother lived in. She would choose a book or some photos and then read and daydream until it was time for lights out. There were photos of endless looking skies of all different and magnificent colors. There were images of large bodies of water called oceans, lakes and rivers that housed creatures and plants. Most of the photos were of a place called a forest, and her grandmother was in many of these ones. She must have liked the forest most of all. Aleya learned that these forests along with the oceans were sometimes referred to as the lungs of the earth. They allowed humans to live in the outside world, but as more and more people stopped listening with their hearts, they began to poison the oceans and the soil of the earth and cut down all the trees. Aleya couldn’t understand how they could let this happen. Then she remembered her grandmother’s words again and she held the locket around her neck.

There were two other books Aleya loved to look through called cookbooks. They had pictures of the food people ate, and how they would combine some of them together and make a whole new food. The foods were all colors, shapes and textures and they looked like so much fun to play with. Then you got to eat them also. At the Centers, they only had two colors of food (both a shade of brown) and two consistencies (think and thin). The thicker one was given shortly after lights came on, and then two lighter ones given later in the day. They came from the lab for which she was very grateful for, but she couldn’t help dreaming of a rainbow of different foods sprouting up from the ground. It sounded so magical. The lights were starting to dim, so Aleya gathered up the books and photos and put them in their place under her bed. As she did every night, she took down the photo of the blue sky and clouds by her bed and replaced it with the night sky one which had stars and a crescent moon. She opened the locket around her neck, as she liked to sleep knowing she would be enveloped by the love and wisdom her grandmother told her about. “Be still and listen,” her grandmother had told her. She was very still at night, and she liked to think she could listen in her dreams. As the lights went out, she drifted off to sleep dreaming of a world with skies, and oceans and earth that food grows from; a world like her grandmother lived in. This world would be a little different. In this world they would listen with their hearts too.