Memories of Something Beautiful #PlanetOrPlastic

     As a ten-year-old little girl, Aleyda used to love swimming in the ocean, finding the beautiful colour of the water mesmerizing just as much as the sea life below the surface; even the tiny shrimp that pinched her toe and the bed of jellyfish that stung her legs.

     Fast-forward three years to her next visit to the same spot and the ocean wasn't what it used to be. Instead of the vibrant colour present in her memories, she stepped across the beach and down to the water that was now poop brown and smelled of salty pollution. She stopped at the edge of the water and felt tears slide down her cheeks because she could no longer swim there; she could no longer experience the pain of a jellyfish stinging her since they no longer showed up there; and she could no longer experience seeing the beautiful sand shifting between her toes as she walked through the water, a smile plastered across her sunburnt face.

     Fast-forward seventeen years to the present year, where pollution has begun to kill off once beautiful and stunning reefs, plastic is being eaten or swallowed by the creatures of the sea and killing or maiming them, and metals and pollution runoff are creating algae that is destroying the plant life that the ocean creatures need to survive and making the water uninhabitable and unusable.

     Each time Aleyda saw a sea turtle choking on single-use plastic straws, a seahorse with its tail wrapped around a Q-Tip, or a whale beached and dead with a belly full of plastic bags, she knew that if nothing was done, Earth would surely die.

     So, she set about building a machine that could send her back in time so that she could warn the past about what pollution would do to the planet. It took her three long years to succeed, but when she did, she immediately sent herself back with videos and pictures.

     Yes, breaking the law of time would change many things, but in the end it was worth it.

     As her life disappeared from the future she had left, she held onto her memories and battled the past, showing people effective ways of reducing pollution so that it wouldn't destroy the many bodies of water that dotted Earth's surface.

     Fast-forward to our present time, where Aleyda is now only present in books and educational classes that teach people how to respect nature and save all life on Earth. The same ocean that Aleyda had visited as a ten-year-old and then later as a thirteen-year-old was as vibrant and full of life as ever and a new child steps into the waters and stops with a smile on her face as a tiny shrimp pinches her pinky toe and a bed of jellyfish slowly floated nearby without a worry in the world.