By Leah Moriarty
You have just woken up, your eyelids feel heavy, and your eyes can’t stand the bright light
from the sun or the odd breezy cold rushing through your room when it was boiling last
night…you nudge yourself out of bed and make your way to your phone which you so cleverly
put across the room so you had to get up to turn your alarm off. The thing is, you can’t
remember getting up or pressing snooze.
You quickly forget about it, though and unplug your phone, heading to the kitchen, completely
ignoring the window that was clearly broken, framing the ruined electrical lines for the
neighborhood. Your eyes are drooping and halfway closed, you make your way down the stairs,
and on the last step, you feel something wet, at first you freak out because now, you are
experiencing wet socks, but as your eyes adjust to the light and open wide you see something
out of a dystopian novel and definitely more terrifying than wet socks.
You bat your eyes across the room as fast as you can, you’re trying to grasp the situation. All
of your windows were broken everything was soaked, a tsunami? Flood? But wait no. You live
in Arizona– SWOOSH, right before you can complete your thought a tree smashes into the side
of the house. You run out through the once-existing sliding glass door and see this isn’t an
occurrence special to you.
You stand baffled, and scared, yet you can’t make a move, all you can see is your backyard
fence is gone and through the droplets rushing into your face due to the winds are disaster after
disasters the ground rumbling, the clouds grey and angry, and water receding from your
neighborhood supposedly to make itself another new larger wave. Your adrenaline finally kicks
in and before you can think you find yourself running for your life up the block.
You see a man up on the side of the curb sitting, you meet his disheartened eyes and realize
you’ve seen him before…on the news, that was the climate scientist that was organizing
protests on upsetting the earth or as he put it… “mother nature”. You stop when you notice the
cardboard sign he was hugging, in disbelief you stare… “was he right..?” you kept thinking as
you read “the end is now, we upset her”.
If you want to be more informed on climate change I recommend:
https://climate.nasa.gov/
