The Poetry of Earth

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” - Emerson

New York is a city that imprints itself upon your soul. Once you enter the concrete jungle, a part of you will be tethered to the unforgiving brick and steel for as long as you survive on Earth. For the past five years, my days have been filled to the brim with heated subway cars, crowded streets, and the terrible smell of humidity that’s somehow always mixed with weed. Sitting in the middle of a subway filled with way too many people, the screeching of the wheels on the tracks deafening to the ear, it’s absolutely ironic to think about where I’m going and what I do.

On 8th Avenue, sitting between 40th and 41st street, only a few minutes away from the heart of Times Square, is the New York Times headquarters. I work here. Specifically, I write for the “Climate and Environment” column. Every morning I walk through sliding glass doors with a plastic Starbucks cup of cold brew, wearing Zara or H&M, and I go up the elevator to sit at my desk and write about our carbon footprint and fast fashion’s impact on climate change. I never meant for it to be this way, but these days, hypocrisy seems to be at the center of everything I do. Of everything I am. It never feels quite right, but day in and day out, nothing ever changes.

My phone screen lights up with a Facebook message from someone I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. As if my hands had a mind of their own, my fingers stopped tapping at the keyboard and swiped to open the message. His smile is the same in his profile picture as it was the last time I saw him.

Hey! Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you had some time this weekend? 

Five summers ago, Adrian was the most important person in my life. He was whimsical, fantastical, and down to earth, all at the same time. He was the first person I met walking into my freshman year writing seminar and the last person I told goodbye before moving across the country to start a new life in New York. He was, in a word, poetry. Indescribable, yet completely ordinary, like how words on a page could just be words until you put them in a certain order. And then, suddenly, it’s brilliance and it’s art.

As students and aspiring artists, we spent a lot of time walking through forests and gardens, breathing in the earth and all its majestic properties. From the highest point in our campus, looking out into the wilderness, we could see for what seemed like miles. Trees lined the horizons, and if we turned towards the rising sun, we could see a wide lake body that stretched across a valley marked by ragged mountains. The world, it seemed, was at once right at our fingertips and too vast to comprehend. 

During our four years together, Adrian’s smile and naive beliefs about the fate of our planet became the foundation of all of my work. He gave me the inspiration I needed to reach for better opportunities and the courage to actually grab onto them when they came. I am where I am because of his belief in me, and in turn, I have become exactly what he despised.

I’m in the Catskills for a few days. A friend of mine entered the bike race thing? 

I hovered over the keyboard. He can see that I’ve read his messages, but do I really have to respond? We hadn’t spoken in what must have been years.

There’s an extra spot in our cabin if you want to come by. I heard there’s a lot of cool 

nature trails and we can catch up :)

I look at my calendar, though I already know that it’s blank for the weekend. For a city so crowded, it still managed to make me feel alone. Adrian’s smiling face peered at me through the screen, genuine and trusting. He doesn’t know how I’m living my life, how I’ve disregarded everything we used to think important, how I’m writing about saving the environment while I consume the products that destroy it. 

Oh, cool! Yeah, I’m free :) 

Before I get the time to second guess myself, I hit send.

It’s a 3 hour drive to the Catskills from Manhattan, and when I get there, everything is just as I remember it to be. Every face tells a story, and Adrian’s has always been my favorite. He’s an open book, but behind his eyes are hundreds and thousands of untold tales. The familiarity of it all is much too great, and it’s much too easy to fall back into old patterns, pretend that the last few years hadn’t happened at all.

He doesn’t get around to asking about my work and my life until we’re getting drinks at a local bar after sunset. A part of me thought about lying. What would be the harm in telling him that I’m just the same as I was when I left California? That I care just as much about the environment as I used to, and that I’m still doing everything I can to preserve what precious natural resources we have left to spare? What would be the harm in letting him believe that I am still the person he fell in love with? I’ll be gone in two days, anyways.

But I tell the truth. I talk about my work with the New York Times and the recent article I wrote about green energy vehicles. I talk about how hot the city is, how unbearable and suffocating it can feel. I talk about how I’ve been consuming fast fashion and plastic cups of coffee and how easy it is to fall into a pattern of caring less, because it’s just hard. It’s just too hard to be like we were as bright-eyed college students with a heart of gold and nature all around us, enticing us to do better. 

Adrian watches me as I vent, listens as he takes sips from his beer. When I’m done, there’s a stillness in the air, unperturbed by the noise and chatter going on around us. His eyes, a strange mix of brown and green that I’ve never quite been able to place, were intense, but without judgement. I nursed my own drink, taking a moment to look around the bar as I waited for...for Adrian to speak? For me to gather enough thoughts together to speak again? For me to apologize? I didn’t know. The bar was rather crowded for its size, likely a result of the bike race bringing in more tourists than the town was used to. Yet, somehow, it didn’t feel quite like the nightlife I’ve experienced in the city. In New York, I always felt the need to drink, and to drink a lot. To drown myself so that the thickness of the air didn’t suffocate me first. Here, I was happy to be relatively sober, even with all these people milling around me. I could see the town outside, and the road was empty and quiet. What light remained from the setting sun painted the sidewalks a dirty yellow-orange and the streetlamps were just flickering on. 

“Hey, are you busy tomorrow?”

“What?” I turned my head so quickly my vision blurred, my voice was a bit hoarse and I coughed to clear it. “Uh, no. I mean, I didn’t make any plans.”

Adrian smiled, downing the rest of his beer. “Let’s turn in early tonight, then. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bright and early. There’s something I want to show you.”

I watched him get off his stool and make his way through the crowd towards the open door. My eyes fell on my half-finished cocktail. He was always such a morning person.

Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

My phone alarm goes off for what must be the fourth time this morning. The disgusting fire alarm-esque buzzing wracks my brain, making my bones vibrate in my body. It’s always been a monstrous task getting out of bed so early in the morning, but for Adrian, I had always done it. Admittedly, it had felt a lot easier when my body was a few years younger and my mind free of the knowledge of corporate life in the real world. 

It was barely 5AM by the time Adrian knocked on my door, dressed in a simple t-shirt and basketball shorts and a wide smile across his face. Outfit-wise, we were matching, but when I smiled, it felt more like a grimace, and my hair had a way of looking quite like an amateur bird’s nest in the morning that was unlikely to be matched. 

Despite my dreadful appearance and even more dreadful demeanor in the mornings, Adrian never failed to stay positive as he dragged me from place to place. As freshmen on campus, he took me all over the grounds to find the best spots to get pictures of the sunset. As sophomores and juniors, we ventured out a little further from our university grounds, finding hiking trails into mountains and lakes. In our senior year, we spent most of our time revisiting those places that we were sure to miss. Today, it seemed that there was only one place he wanted us to see.

We climbed for what felt like an age or an eternity, but when Adrian stopped, I managed to turn my eyes towards the wilderness around us for the first time since we began our ascent. 

For miles around us, the forest engulfed the landscape, texturing it with their patterns and colors. Ahead of me, I could see the first light of the sun, turning the jagged mountain faces varying shades of red and orange. And between those mountain faces, a lake. Even from a distance, I felt I could see it rippling, see the reflection of the mountains and trees and the sun that was eagerly rising from behind it all.

My chest tightened. Tears stung at the corners of my eyes. Adrian was looking at me, but I couldn’t look back. 

“It looks exactly like what we saw that first day, doesn’t it?”

I nodded. It wasn’t an exact match, of course, but it was so close. The memories of when I was younger, but a better version of who I am now, almost hurt to remember, but the image I saw laid out before me was magical.

“You’re still you. You’ve been stuck in a city for five years, but you’re still you, Paris.”

I He must have felt my skepticism, because he moved closer and put an arm around my shoulders, pointing out towards the sun with the other. I followed his gaze, squinting against the light. The colors of the sun, the yellow with the red and the orange, had always been my favorite colors. Mixed in with the greenness of the trees, the blueness of the water, even the beiges and browns of mountains; this had always been my favorite picture.

“It’s in your spirit. It doesn’t matter where you go, what you do, you can always come back to this.”

The colors. Your spirit won’t ever forget them.