Turtles in the pacific
The turtles and the sea. The recurrent dream that had him tired of waking. The irony of it hurt his soul. Waking up to dust floating in the room, with heat that could not be ignored, even when not awake. The turtles he had never seen in real life, only in pictures and tales that his parents told him. Of the days where there was not dust.
He’s heard the rumors that dust in other cities is not orange. He’s heard water merchants say further south the dust is gray, because of the fires. It’s not even dust they said, technically it’s ash from millions of dead trees. Sailor merchants from the east say the dust is yellow but sometimes orange as well, just like the Backwater. When he was a child he pondered a lot on how the other cities with their other dust colors would look, how the sunsets would be, and even if there were other cities with no dust at all. He never heard a merchant say this though.
Old people, from his parent’s generation, said they were sure there were still places with no dust. With living trees. ‘Out there in the ocean’ they would say — ‘Out in the Pacific in the Polynesia there should still be some islands left’. No one that was young was very sure of that. Even if it were true, what could they do about it? They knew they could find the Pacific all the way to the West, but it was a suicidal journey, without constant water supply from the merchants. The only groups that were able to move that far were raiders and nomads, if you could make that distinction at all. And even if they could get to the Pacific. What then? How could they get to Hawaii, which was said to be thousands of kilometers away from the shore? Even then, people used to go by plane, and Backwater did not know what a boat was.
So he dreamed of turtles. Even if it was bittersweet. He had some pictures from very old National Geographic magazines that his aunt found buried in rubble. ‘I think you will like this’ – she said, with a smile that did not show her decaying teeth, but put into evidence the decay of her health in the wrinkles of her face that carved deep into her skin despite her -old era- young age of thirty three years old. He was merely a boy back then, six years old. But he devoured the magazines. Frogs, leopards, people with strange facial features and even more strange clothing, immense buildings full of shining glass. And skies with no dust. A sunset that made him finally understand the meaning of the word.
Despite all of the marvels that he had seen in the images, the sea creatures had stuck with him the most. Creatures living in water. Creatures breathing water. From all of them, the turtle had been his favorite, but he did not know why. He had always thought that they were very pretty. There were only two different turtles in the magazine; Betty, which was named in the text, with plenty of pictures of her journey to the beach, and the one that he named Ornaldo, for there was no story for her in the pages. But he created plenty of stories for Ornaldo and Betty to live in together as friends, riding the currents and waves of the Pacific, from California all the way to Santiago.
He had not opened the magazines for years. He kept only two of the original ten because of the frugality burnings of each year. It would have been allowed to only keep one of them, but he managed to make the case to keep both of them in a tribunal when he was fifteen. He was still proud that he could manage to do that, after all these years. There were still some people his age that remembered and respected him for that. Most elders remembered that tribunal; it was the first time that a case had been accepted for an exception of the frugality law, and they resented him. But they also respected his posture and his manner of exposing his desire to keep the images alive.
This was the only thing that he remembered as an accomplishment on his part. The only thing of his making that he has been proud of for all his life.
It has now been almost ten years since that. And he felt that he had accomplished nothing. ‘That’s why I dream of turtles’ – he sometimes told himself. ‘Because the prospect of the future is no better than what you can find in magazines’ ‘Because there is nothing alive in the dust but people willing to slit each other’s throats for a glass of water’ ‘Because we are doomed by a past that was not made by us but makes us’ — he stopped right there to take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. He did not have the strength to deal with these kinds of thoughts right now. It was early in the morning and he did not even got out of bed. Inhale, get out of bed, exhale.