What we used to have. || #PlanetOrPlastic ||

Drought.

Alia looked, with a heavy heart, the mess in her family. The water has run out again and she doesn't remember when was the last time she took a shower properly. It's been less than a decade since the ocean began to dry up, the rivers are unknown by the younger generations and that's something she can't assimilate yet, even when it's not a surprise. She knew it some time ago.

Her feet swap the sand of the old beach that is close to her small coastal house, there's a lot of  government's posters that prohibit the passage because that territory, where the ocean used to be and the rests of water is, is now research material where scientists look for underground water. Alia felt sick.

She picks up her hair in a messy bun and licks her always dry lips, her nails are pale and her tanned skin is not healthy anymore. The heat is always on the verge of being unbearable but she manages it to lie on the sand and stay there for a while before fall asleep, the vague wind waving the palms around her house and the shadow of the broad leaves on her head.

Alia sees herself some summers ago in that house for vacations, her dad a researcher who with the government salaries could pay that small place for her, her mom and her little brother. The young girl remembers with sorrow when she used to submerge herself in the sea, through the waves and crystalline water, in her short seven years old. The pollution was just a bad joke.

Her eyes squeezed into a nightmare where the beach was almost uninhabitable, the debris along the sand and the uncomfortable feeling of plastics brushing her skin when she tried to dive.

She looks now, concerned and sad, the wonderful world she had wanted for her little brother; Looks directly at where the ocean joined with the sky, wanting to hear the waves and to see again the blue sky.

"The days are heavy, they arrive with news of death, the most beautiful worlds have been burned with our hands, and we stopped crying: the sadness is gone, our tears have dried up, and because of that, we have forgotten the forgiveness."

-Nico