By Nikita Kanjani
The high, sunlit clouds danced across the vibrant evening sky, awashed with an ombre of peach and apricot cream. Tender little ice-cream coulds were perfused somewhere in the graduated tone of lilac and pomegranate firmament above. Overhead, an exodus of banished birds appeared out of nowhere, as if out of a Celtic fairytale, followed by the appearance of a solomon-gold light of a mighty eagle that soared high across the skyline, generating a stream of silver white line – shaped like a heart. The sun set low on the horizon, scattering its orange-red rays on the rainwashed leaves which were caressed by the pulsing heart of nature - home to the trees of preternatural green. Its ancient trees were stretched away from the crinkly forest ground, absorbing the scintillating vibrance from the Sun and smiled, emitting a sweet fragrance of the forest, accompanied by its comforting goodness.
On the spur of the moment, I felt a pair of tremulous fins tapping against my eerie scales, entrancing me out of what I hoped wouldn’t be what I thought it was – a dream.
“Wake up, Kiki!” he shook me awake, with a sense of tremor and dread slammed all over his face.
His fins were all shuddery, his eyes all watery and his echo, overpowered by the whispers of the ailing evergreen plants, gulping down the shattered remnants of oxygen.
“Pac?” I asked, hoping to question his cause of such commiseration, but before I could utter another word, he continued to say the following words that would change the way I viewed my home forever – the ocean.
I was born into thinking my home looked like a polished mirror of silver luminous light, with droplets of swirl-white twisting slowly on its surface; boulders annexed to the edges of my home, with buffed pillows of moss and ferns scintillating its greenery to the Sun. It gave the leaves a green-going-to-gold complexion, sheltered by the misty loom of light that chased the shadows of vivid darkness away, flooding us with light. Transparent, ferrocyanide surfaces of the water reflected the tip of the mahogany-almond-brown forest and casted moving shadows of hummingbirds, screeching high up in the canopy of trees, chirping a harmony cadence of music that brought life to the forest, letting the leaves bristle and dance along the waves of air currents – a gift of mother nature.
However, that’s not reality now, is it? It’s nothing-
but a broken dream.
Because so far down in the ocean, the Earth has never provided me with a tinge of its blithe. Beneath you, the sunlight is a soft, diffused glow. I know that the Sun is a star, I'd just never seen it before. There is such a difference between knowing and being able to look at it. The once golden rays from above are only laser black and ebony in this gritty, tainted water; and the deeper I swim, the lesser light can penetrate – but the darkness had greeted me with opening arms more than the surface covered with piles of trash ensconced on the surface of my home has ever done - the swirling brown blur of dust. The rocks were shaped like blood-curdling venom in the dim, with the absence of the morning stars that peeked down at us like silver asters, glinting and shimmering, sharing some of its luminous shade of white. Noises of chattering, sing-song by the humming birds that travelled in constant transverse motions to the resplendent vicinity was replaced by the reality of a myriad of poignant cries and chants, when will mankind realise they’re slowly killing us all? The light from my headlight died quicker than the heat from a winter campfire.
From time to time I am surprised by a lone fish, invisible until it enters the feeble beam, afraid of death welcoming its soul. It's cold too, colder than I imagined it would be. With the increasing pressure from the weight of the tundra-cold and merciless ocean, I begin to feel like the water is thicker, like soup. I glance upward to the surface and my heart rate rises, I've never been this deep before. My desire to hide behind the reefs, hoping to dream of a world filled with hope while the looming shadows of an excavator – darker than the colour black, discards the trash of mankind, leaving us with no trace of light, as if it was ever there. All I ever desired was the fresh air - oxygen. Before I could stop myself, I began kicking with quick and powerful strokes. The voice of caution whispers softly not to rise, lay low, but it can't break through the scream for unfiltered rays and fresh air...
I know you’re hearing me; I know you can hear me right now, please save me. I want to live the life the world promised to give me. Like how you do, I want to be able to breathe in the vaporous mists of air, see the plushness and opulence of the light and the lucid snowflake of stars as they lay like sprinkles of light in the peaceful, voiceless, midnight sky where the moon would cast down splinters of the lustrous-gold, making the sea crests sparkle like elf light. I ail to see the various colours of diffused rays, just like the ones I dreamt about, to hear the soft scuttles of rabbits and hedgehogs as they run to the illuminating scents of purple berries, corresponding to the violet shade of the night sky.
Slowly closing my eyes, I let my stream of consciousness take hold, drifting me into infinity. When I awoke, I couldn’t remember my dream, but the softness, silvers and gold still clung to what was left of nothing but a simple, shattered, fainted memory part of nothing but a useless, yet uncontrollable dream.
My name is Kiki and this is my home - the Great Pacific Garbage.
By Nikita Kanjani