This is part of a series of short stories I have written recently. I felt it was prescient to share it now as it deals with themes of humanity, the environment, joy, grief and hope. I hope you enjoy it!

This is a completely fictional story that takes inspiration from many real life events. 

---

“I love these kinds of days. They really make me feel alive”, Ricardo smiles and runs his hands through his plentiful but graying hair, adjusting the collar of his brown corduroy jacket and smiling at the sun. He turns fully towards it, its light illuminating his face and he sighs deeply and contentedly. The sun cuts through the wispy white blankets of fog, droplets of water cling to the blades of grass, they shine resplendently. The leaves glow in all the colors of fall, they litter the ground, but a fair amount still grasp the branches of the old trees that are numerous in this area, the main reason why Ricardo wanted to live there. The droplets of water on the evergreen trees make them glimmer brilliantly. Ricardo crouches down and points out a tiny intricately woven spider web in the golden grass. It catches the tiniest drops of water and like everything else it seems luminescent and magical. 

“We count on the sun rising every day and it has never betrayed all these billions upon billions of years. It’s the most ordinary thing, the one thing we can always count on, yet it never loses its magic. I mean just look around, you can see why our ancestors worshiped it as god, no? Its magical”, he ruffles his hair with his hands and stands up, putting his head back and closing his eyes, “gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto” he murmurs, the song of Violeta Parra seems fit for a day like this and what he feels inside, a moment that really makes one feel happy to be alive. 

“Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto”, Victoria begins to sing, her voice full and resonant, exuberant and radiant, her eyes laugh. 

“Me dio dos luceros 

Que cuando los abro 

Perfecto distingo 

Lo negro del blanco 

Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado”

“Thanks to life, which has given me so much.

It gave me two beams of light, that when opened,

Can perfectly distinguish black from white

And in the sky above, her starry backdrop”. 

She stops at the line, “cuando miro el bueno tan lejos del malo/cuando miro el fondo de tus ojos claros” and looks to her father. “When I see good so far from bad/When I see within the clarity of your eyes”. 

“Doesn’t that song ever make you sad?”

“Sure it does, mostly because of nostalgia. Why does it make you sad?”

“Violeta wrote that song not long before she killed herself. It was her last song, it’s so jubilant and contented, she knew the world was vast and beautiful but it wasn’t enough to stop her from not wanting to be here anymore. All of this beauty couldn’t stop her from wanting to die, I always think of that.”

“I’ve never been able to understand that either. Well…it’s a strange topic. You know, well I’ve shared with you, there were times I wished to die, but never did I think to end it by my own hand because of despair. I’ve had several friends who have, and every time I never understood why either. But really think about it, none of this, not the beauty of this planet nor the beauty of our fellow humans is enough to make us stop ruining and destroying it. Look at the beauty of these trees”, he stops and places his hand on a huge Patagonian Oak that grows to the side of the trail, he caresses its grayish brown bark, “it still doesn’t stop people from cutting them down. It’s like we are addicted to self destruction. We think it is completely normal to wreak utter havoc and destruction on entire worlds.”

“On this planet for sure”, Victoria shakes her head sadly. 

“Well exactly, but I meant it like this. When we cut down a tree needlessly we are ending an entire universe in a sense. When we take a fellow human’s life we are ending an entire world. We think we can keep doing that, on and on, because there will always be another tree, we’ll never run out. We can keep killing, because one doesn’t really matter does it? And what’s going to happen in the end?”

“There’ll be nothing left and only then will we see what we’ve done, that’s what I’m scared of.”

“Exactly. It makes me tremble to think about it, Victoria, we’re killing ourselves. What’s going to happen one day? Are we going to wake up and realize the nightmare is real life when we are choking on all the trash we’ve created, drinking polluted water, unable to breathe because we’ve cut the last tree. Then we’ll look out the window and see that we’ve turned this planet into a trash heap and a cemetery. We’re killing ourselves and none of this beauty, none of this is enough to stop us”, he pauses for a moment to collect himself, then continues. 

“Easter Island…did you ever go with that group in university, I can’t remember?”

“I did.”

“You never told me what you thought of it, and I think—what year was that? ’88? Yes, we were moving houses and very distracted, I never even asked you did I? How did it make you feel?”

“Depressed. I didn’t want to think about it, I hated it there. It’s a tiny example of what we’re doing to the entire planet.”

“They cut down all the trees. When the Europeans got there in 1722 there wasn’t a tree over ten feet, I read once. Every single species of tree that once grew there is gone forever, extinct. You’d think it would be a lesson for us, that we would see that and learn. It was a warning.”

“It was a very strange place, I remember wanting to get away as fast as possible. I think it scared me deeply, seeing what was possible. There’s nothing particularly terrifying about the island, I mean I’ve been to many places, some very dangerous as you know, dad, but it’s eerie, it’s just so quiet and desolate. Literally nothing there except the statues. The feeling of isolation and oblivion is so strong. It feels as if well…”

“It feels like exile?”

“Yes it does. Exile from the earth, as if you’ve been left there, left behind, forever expelled because of something terrible you’ve done.”

“Exile! And it wouldn’t be unfair, we deserve it, look how we’ve despoiled the precious gifts we were given, all we had to do was take care of it, but we can’t even do that. We can’t even manage to not kill our brothers, let alone take care of our home. It wouldn’t be unfair to expel us, revoke these blessings, but it would also be profoundly unfair. It becomes profoundly and barbarically unfair when you look at who has despoiled paradise, it hasn’t been everyone, but everyone is now being forced to pay the price. It makes me crazy to think about it”, he stops before he fully breaks down, his eyes are full of tears and he looks away ruefully. Victoria throws her arms around his shoulders and rests her head on his chest like she did when she was a little girl. 

“Come on, dad, don’t cry!”

“I love life, I love you, I love your mother, I love this planet and its people and I don’t want it all to end because we can’t see the humanity and life that envelopes us and breathes ebullience into our souls. I wish we could just see what we have before we lose it. Perhaps humans deserve this punishment, but how is that true if those being punished did nothing wrong? They are being forced to pay for crimes they did not commit. It’s cruel, Victoria, so damn cruel, capitalism is once again laughing in our faces, they’ve exploited people, exploited nature, exploited labor, exploited every last thing there is to exploit, and now they are making humanity pay for their sins.” 

“Do you think we’ll realize it before it’s too late?”

“That’s what makes it worse, we can’t even agree on simple things, let alone all come together to save our world.”

“So you’re in despair?”, she looks up at him, her head still on his chest.

“No, never despair”, he kisses her forehead, “how can I despair when there is so much good in the world and so much I love? I cannot despair so long as you’re alive, that would just be cruel, to bring children into the world while you despair for its future.”

“So what can we do? What’s the solution?”

“There’s no single solution except for solidarity and humanity. Seeing humanity, no matter who they are or where in the world is the most important, most beautiful, most powerful thing we can do. Come on, let’s keep going. ”

The sun has burned off the mist by now and the sky, blue and mostly cloudless is like a dream. They walk in silence for a while. 

“The most important thing is humanity”, Ricardo says barely audibly as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “I’ve seen what happens when we lose humanity. It’s worse than hell, well I don’t know for sure but it must be. I can’t imagine anything worse than dehumanization.” He goes quiet again. He knows very well what that looks like. He saw it happen, gradually, then all at once, the look that comes over these young men as they lose sympathy for their fellow humans. He’s seen them gradually become monsters, or at the very least the accomplices of monsters. He’s known some that looked away, down in shame and refused to meet his eyes. He’s also known those who had no shame, those who were proud of their work, some who enjoyed it, in the end even they couldn’t meet his eyes. 

He’d known many soldiers, for a man who had avoided touching weapons as much as he did, he knew an awful lot about those soldiers, every detail. He knew their smell, their cold and disdainful laughter, their crude language and tasteless jokes. He knew their threats, their rage that would burst up through their placid and dispassionate facades. He knew their conceit and contempt, their sense of superiority and the sense of supremacy they took on the moment they grasped power. He knew their arrogance from the ways they screamed at the prisoners, the things they felt comfortable saying to other humans never stopped playing out in his head. Ricardo knew very well what a man who is convinced another man is a subhuman, no better than a flea, something to be exterminated, can do. He had seen them execute people for no more than a few illegal words. All these years later he still revisited it with disbelief. He had seen it himself, heard it, experienced every bit of it, yet at times had trouble believing it himself, the ways people could be compelled to act, the acts they could be compelled to commit.

He knew inhumanity, he knew its look, its smell, its sound and its silence. He knew the grasp of its claws, its iron teeth, its precision, its mechanisms, so well the thought of it gave him chills and he buttoned up his jacket, even though it was warmer now than when they had set out. He shrugged off the shudder that ran through his body and kept his eyes on the trail.

There wasn’t much that could scare Ricardo after everything he had lived, loss was one, the other was inhumanity. He knew its work, how it gained power like an avalanche. How it was built over time, progressively, insidiously, silently, the lists grew longer. One day you could look away because it wasn’t your name that was marked for annihilation, the next it was your neighbor, you looked away until the claws came for your own neck, until their icy grip grasped your body too. As you are dragged from your home, someone else turns away too, it isn’t them yet, but it will be. They watch as you are dragged from your home, your face already bloody and turning purple because you dared say no. They turn away. They watch the news of bombs falling on children over there, wherever over there may be. They turn away. It’s not their children yet, thank god, but it will be. Not yet however, so, they think, will it ever actually happen? The danger seems so far away is it actually a danger? Just like the forest, one more tree is felled, but there will always be more, until one day there won’t be, that day you will realize you can no longer breathe. That day you will realize that it has happened to you too. You will see that your indifference killed you too, its promises of safety were lies too, your silence never protected you. 

But how does any of that connect to crying about deforestation and ecological destruction? What does any of this have to do with the mist, the sun and the Patagonia oak trees? Ricardo knew it was all the same, a lack of care for life, for all living things, for the earth, all borne of inhumanity, of cruelty, of selfishness. It leaves scars, terror and nightmares. It destroys lives, ends lives. It has the possibility to end life, once and for all. The soldier is an executor, a perpetrator, even though he doesn’t know how big the machine he serves is. He knows he has the power to end a man’s life, though at that point he no longer sees him as a man, but as a thing. He feels powerful in that moment, if you ask him who he serves he’ll say his country, he has no idea what he’s a part of, he’s a servant, convinced he’s a king; a puppet who believes he’s a puppet master; a tool who thinks he’s a builder. He is a fool, he feels powerful, that’s all he knows. He knows how it makes him feel, the way authority feels when it surges through his veins, intoxicating and addictive. The machine demands more, more, more! It never stops with his conscience, he doesn’t realize it until it’s done, that he’s finally sold his soul for just one more taste of it. Power. The most powerful drug of all. 

“Isn’t it funny, I have to write an entire book to express what one song can. One song and the thought is no less complete than the book you’ve just inspired me to write. Don’t let anyone tell you that a writer is any more advanced or prestigious than a musician. Music can make us feel without even so much as one word, we need tens of thousands to tell the story and even then we read it and feel as if there still aren’t enough and what we’ve said hasn’t been fully expressed. Did you know Fidel Castro has stage fright? Yes, it’s true, he said it himself. Even after he has made a 5 hour speech, he feels he still hasn’t truly articulated his meaning, that there’s still things unsaid and things he could have elaborated on more. Maybe that made me feel a bit better as a writer because when I was young I wished to be like him, to be able to express my thoughts so completely and elaborately—ironic right? There are never enough words to elucidate feelings, that’s why we crave poems and songs, because they don’t try to use too many words, they make us feel the words in our souls. Then the words become unnecessary, we are simply left with the humming of our souls and the beating of our hearts which we understand perfectly. I know, I’ve gone off on an unrelated tangent, but it is all related, because what I mean to say is, I love life, I am a fool, Victoria, I always have been.  I’ve always been this way, which is why I can still be happy, even in the face of horror and destruction. That and birds, look!”, he whispers urgently the last word, and taps her shoulder.

This meadow is the best place to look for birds. Sometimes he sees common ones, like the cernicalo, a type of sparrow hawk, he’s just pointed out, other times he has seen rare birds like the critically endangered endemic Chilean Woodstar, a type of bee hummingbird. Birds, Ricardo always said, were perfection, everything about them was magical to him, their ability to take flight for one, and their constant communications with earth and heaven. Their flawless colors; vibrant, electric and iridescent, or earthy and modest, all the same they dazzled him. The arrangement of the plumage, from the largest ones of condors to the tiniest, almost invisible ones of hummingbirds, Ricardo found no word better than perfection to describe them. 

For the sake of the poetry, we would like to imagine it was some type of rare and exceptionally beautiful bird that gave Ricardo the will to live when he most needed it. But the pigeon that landed on the light post in front of him was in that moment, the most beautiful thing in the world. 

“How could we not protect and tend to life, when it is always there, even in the deepest darkness, urging us to look forward? Life is always present, it is pervasive, it breaks concrete, invades prisons, it cannot be stopped. The machine consumes more and more of it as we speak, but it still rebels.”

He smiles, knowing even that is an act of rebellion. He embraces Victoria, the warmth and love that washes over everything in that moment is an act of rebellion as well. In the face of an empire , to love is to resist. Feeling his heart still beating, he knows that too is a rebellion, it should have been stopped long ago, but it continues, Ricardo thinks sometimes out of pure rebellion in the face of those who tried to stop it. 

“Gracias a la vida”, someone thinks or says. 

“¡Que me ha dado tanto!”, someone else smiles.