Things May Change

It was May when I met Tara. It makes sense that it was May. I feel like May was always the month of change—especially here in New Jersey. It’s when green finally starts growing on the trees and life returns to the world after a bitter winter and spring. I liked going on walks in the forest back then. I’m glad I enjoyed the simple pleasures in life like golden sunlight twinkling through the canopy of leaves, back when I had the chance. That way I don’t have as many regrets as the others who are left. 

I was taking a walk in the woods that day, in the beginning of May, wearing a gigantic sweatshirt and shorts to enjoy the sun while still shielding myself from the breeze. I liked jumping between the rocks in the mountainous area, with streams forming miniature waterfalls running beside me. It was while I was jumping from rock to rock that I began to feel eyes trained on me. I froze still as possible in case it was some hostile animal. The only sound I heard was the stream and some splashing. I paused. That splashing sound wasn’t normal. 

Slowly, I turned my head toward the sound of splashing. There was a person sitting with their feet in the water, with dark skin, long unruly dark hair falling around their body, and the most piercing green and blue eyes I’d ever seen. Despite being fully naked, I couldn’t tell what gender the person was. Their feet were kicking the water of the stream around while staring at me, a look of curious wonder on their face. I’d like to say I acted coolly in the situation. I didn’t. 

I made a horrible noise that could barely be called a scream and fell backward behind the rock I previously stood on. The person tilted their head to the side in confusion, wide eyes still gazing at me. 

“Who- who are you?” I stammered.

“So you speak english.” It seemed as though their accent shifted with each word. “I am Tara.” 

“Why are you in my woods, Tara?” 

“Do these woods belong to you?” My question suddenly felt stupid. They weren’t my woods necessarily. I was just the only person who would consistently walk there, despite it being so beautiful. I turned bright red, my butt still planted on the dirt after my fall. 

“Uh, I guess not.” 

“That’s good. To answer your question, I’m surveying nature.”

“Naked?” 

Tara looked down at themself. “Is it strange to be naked?” 

“I mean, yeah.” Tara just blinked at me. I scrambled up and took off my sweatshirt to hand to them. They took it and looked at me questioningly. “See that hole, right there? You put that one over your head. And these long parts? Your arms go through there.” Hesitantly, they followed my directions. “Oh, by the way, my name’s Penelope An. Are you, uh, from around here?” I stuck my hands in my short pockets and shifted back and forth on my feet. 

“No, I’m from there.” They pointed at the water in the stream. I remember being so confused. At that time, I thought Tara had some kind of amnesia. I guess the whole time they were giving me hints to who they really were. I just ignored them. 

“Why don’t you come home with me Tara. We’ll get you cleaned up and fed.” 

Tara smiled at me—this big, beautiful, disarming smile. “Is your home in the water too?” 

I just laughed it off. I thought they were joking. 

 “So, it’s not much,” I was breathing hard from the climb up the mountain to my house. Opening the door, I apologized, “it’s also really messy, I’m sorry. I live alone so I haven’t cleaned in forever.” I attempted to tidy up as I guided Tara through the place.

“And here’s the bathroom,” I motioned while opening the door, “you can shower here and I’ll give you some of my clothes to change into.”  

Tara just stood there looking at me, their head tilted to the side a bit. I slipped past them and moved toward the shower. 

“Here, you can start it like this,” turning the knob, a trickle of water began to come out of the faucet. Tara’s eyes went wide. They moved to inspect the shower. Because they were shorter than me, they had to jump on me a bit to get a closer look. “And you can adjust the temperature like this. Sorry, the water pressure isn’t great here.” 

“Where does the water come from?” 

I wondered how Tara had gone this long without ever seeing a shower before. They seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. 

“Oh, uh, I think there’s a well below.” I pointed downward and Tara’s eyes followed mine. 

“Do you want more water?”

“What? I mean I guess” 

Tara screwed their eyes shut and balled their fists. Their long hair began to float around them, like they were underwater. I could have sworn they turned transparent. 

Suddenly there was a sputtering noise and water began to shoot out of the shower head with at least five times more pressure than it had before. 

“How’d you do that?”

Tara looked at me with their same big, confused eyes. “I just did it.” 

I nodded. Even then I knew I had picked up someone who would change my life. 

“Okay so in order to shower, you take off your clothes, stand under the water, rub this soap on you—all over your body—and then wash it all off with the water.”

“Alright.” And Tara immediately began taking their clothes off. 

I shut my eyes and turned away. “Wait! Wait until I’m out of here.” I paused for a moment, still facing the other way. “If you don’t mind me asking, what gender are you anyway?” 

Tara laughed. It was such a funny laugh, with tiny gasps for air and snorts and everything. “Spirits of the Earth don’t have a gender, silly. Once you humans stepped away from nature, you really lost so much knowledge, didn’t you?” 

How do you even respond to someone saying something like that? Even now, I don’t know what I should have said. I guess I was starting to believe Tara in some way. Things around them were just a little too mysterious. 

“Oh. cool.” 

That was probably the only stupid response possible. 

I walked out of the bathroom, grabbed some clothes for Tara, and put them outside the shower. Tara seemed to be doing alright, given that it was their first time in a shower. Then, I made some dinner for the two of us. I supposed that I had to make something more than the ramen I’d been eating for the past few weeks. 

Then it dawned on me. Tara probably had no memory of eating food, from what I’d seen. They deserved something special for their first meal. After they stepped out of the bathroom, their wet hair soaking through the sweatshirt I gave them, I proposed our meal. 

“Do you want to go out for food today? There’s the shittiest New Jersey diner down the street from here.” 

“I know I’m new to a lot of your human stuff, but from my knowledge of your language, ‘shitty’ means bad.” 

“You’re not wrong,” I nodded, maintaining the sage expression I often used when I’d explain this to out of staters, “but in New Jersey the bigger the dump of a diner, the better the food is.” 

“Oh. Then I’d like to try it.” 

We went to the diner, and it was just as incredible as I’d imagined. I got “two eggs and bread,” which would sound unimpressive to people who didn’t know diners. For only three dollars a person could get eggs done any style they wanted, with two slices of bread, a plate full of potatoes, and some bacon on the side. It was a genuine treasure. After I suggested it, Tara ordered waffles with strawberries on top—I just thought they’d like strawberries—and disco fries on the side. Their face lit up when they tasted the food for the first time. With a mouth stuffed full of scrambled eggs I asked, “It’s good right?” Although, it probably sounded more like “Iff gooh rahh?” 

Tara’s hauntingly beautiful eyes smiled back in response. Tara couldn’t even manage more than a “mff” in response because their mouth was so stuffed with food. 

Our lives went on like that for about three weeks. Tara stayed at my place. I took them outside to discover our world. I got to see everything through their eyes, as though I was looking at it for the first time right alongside them. 

One day, I took Tara to New York City. They were so shocked to see the sheer number of humans in one place. Not only that, but Tara loved how many experiences were possible in just one city. We walked around Chelsea Market for a while and went in and out of all of the little shops. Tara saw an incredibly small bamboo plant for sale in one store for only twenty-five cents. When I saw the look on their face, I just had to buy it for them (plus it was a great way to get rid of loose change). We got rolled ice cream at Ten Below and walked around Chinatown for a while. Chinatown was always my favorite place to visit with my family when I was little. I recounted memories of the New Year parade, seeing dragons dance across the road as confetti filled the air, getting ice cream from the little shops lining the street. I told Tara I’d take them to next years’ New Year parade. I remember Tara looked sad after that. And I remember the words “I don’t know if there’ll be a next one,” leaving Tara’s mouth. But immediately after saying that, Tara had smiled at me with a big smile that scrunched up their whole face, and I completely forgot about their eerie words. 

Tara would do things like that often—just say haunting things out of nowhere. Another night I took them to a food truck festival, and as we sat on a picnic blanket watching the fireworks Tara said something so quietly I wasn’t sure I heard them correctly. “Your world is so beautiful. I’m going to cry when it ends.” I wanted to ask them about it, but something stopped me. I think it’s because I was so happy then. Spending every day with Tara, showing them the little joys of this world and seeing those wonders through fresh eyes—I was more in love with life than I’d ever been before. Some part of me knew that if I asked them about it, those peaceful times would come to an end.

In the background of those blissful three weeks, the world around us was falling apart. Natural disasters seemed to be ravaging every corner of the globe. Tsunamis, tornados, earthquakes, and pretty much anything you can imagine was tearing the world apart. Any time stories of the natural disasters came on the news, Tara would grow quiet and distant. They would look outside the window with such a melancholy gaze that it made my heart ache. 

At the end of the three weeks, I decided to ask Tara about it. 

We were sitting in the diner again. The old man at the cash register was listening to the radio. I heard a muffled voice come from it, “Volcanoes have been erupting along every tectonic boundary. Mass evacuations have been ordered, but no one really knows where it is safe anymore.” Tara was staring down at the table, playing with their fork to avoid looking at me. 

“Tara, what’s wrong?”

“They are my siblings.” 

I was not expecting that answer. 

“What?”

“My siblings are all doing their jobs. The jobs we were meant to do.”

I paused, trying to gather all of the information together in a way that made sense. “You and your siblings were sent to… blow up the world?” 

They laughed, but it wasn’t like their usual bubbly laugh. This laugh felt as though ice pierced it. “No.” They were silent for a moment. It looked like Tara was trying to figure out what they could say to me. “Nature spirits were sent around the globe to return it.” 

“What do you mean, ‘return it’?” 

They were quiet again. Tara still hadn’t looked me in the eyes. “You’re aware of the fact that the planet has been dying for a while now, right?” 

“Yes.” 

They took a deep breath. “We spirits have lived here for a long time—some of us for thousands of years. I’m young by comparison. My stream only existed for a few hundred. But an order was sent to all of us. We were to sacrifice ourselves by putting the energy of our lives into creating natural disasters. It takes a lot of spiritual energy to create enough natural disasters to bring about the end of an era. And with our deaths new spirits would be born into a new, healthy world. When you found me, I had taken human form to enjoy my stream and this world one last time.” 

 “So if I hadn’t found you right then and there, what would have happened?” 

“Everything here,” Tara motioned around, “would be underwater already.” 

I remember tears stinging my eyes. I remember being mad at myself. I remember scolding myself because I had known something was off about Tara. But I wasn’t even slightly mad at Tara. The only thing I could think of was the fear that they would leave me. That they would sacrifice themself to bring about a new world. 

“You’re not gonna do that though, right?”

Tara was silent. 

“You’re not gonna sacrifice yourself, right?” 

Tears began falling down their face. 

“You’re not gonna leave me, right?” 

I was sobbing out those last few words. I reached across the table and grabbed their hands. 

“Please. You can stay with me. You don’t have to end the world. We can live together in the new world. I don’t care if everyone else is gone.” 

Finally Tara opened up their mouth to speak through their tears, “Spirits were not meant to stay in human form for this long. I am already growing weak. I was hoping not to tell you but today’s my last day-”

“Then just go back to being a stream. I’ll come visit you every day. And every once in a while, you can take this form and we can be together.” 

“Silly humans,” Tara said sadly, “you don’t know anything about spirits, do you?” 

I was a mess of sloppy tears. “No. No, you’re right. I don’t know anything. I don’t understand why you have to do this.” 

They leaned across the table and placed a soft kiss on my forehead. “We at least have today. Please don’t let this last day be a sad one.” 

And so on our last day together we ate a massive shitty diner meal and went back to my house to look at the stars from the roof. I showed Tara all of the constellations and told them the stories humans assigned each one. Tara wondered aloud if the stars have spirits on them, like them and their siblings. Somewhere along the way, I drifted off to sleep, despite wanting to spend every minute that I could with Tara. I swear, I remember hearing their voice say the words in my dream, “Thank you, Penelope An.” 

The next morning, I woke up inside my house. I heard the heaviest rain I’d ever heard in my life outside, banging on the siding like hundreds of thousands of tiny hammers. The power was out. 

By the end of that May, only a week after Tara left, my part of the world was no longer recognizable. Tara was right when they said that all of it would be underwater. The only thing that survived the rain, the hurricanes, the flooding, and freak tsunamis was my house. All of the news sites that flew by to cover the story of the ‘one house left after the storms’ said it was because I lived on top of a mountain. But I knew better. My beloved Tara had spared my house. 

The spirits around the world caused similar natural disasters. In places with water spirits like Tara, there were hurricanes, floods, blizzards, tsunamis, snow avalanches, and more. Other parts of the world got hit by wind spirits. They were taken out by dust storms, tornados, and cyclones. Some places got land spirits and their end came with earthquakes and landslides. Still others got fire spirits. Volcanoes, wildfires, and lightning raged through those areas. There were many human survivors, people who managed to get lucky like me. But there were still more who didn’t survive the disasters. The Earth had truly reclaimed itself. 

Now I still remain at the top of my mountain. Instead of going for walks in the woods, I paddle a canoe over the ocean that surrounds my home. I suppose I should probably stop calling it a house on a mountain and call it a house on an island instead. It’s eerie, looking down from my canoe to see the trees I once walked through, submerged deep below me. 

Every day I take care of Tara's small sprig of bamboo and go out onto the ocean, to get supplies, to see the world, and to search for the new water spirit that resides near my home.