"new" hope.

 The first thing I hear every single morning of my “new” life is the irritating “beep beeep” of my alarm clock. Every time I listen to those annoying rings, I wonder whether getting up is worth it or not: every day that goes by I feel like waking up to live my “new” life is a waste of time. There’s nothing to see out there.

After a sigh, I get up, leaving the comfortable warmth of my bed. “Time to eat” I mumble to myself, as I need to convince myself that I need to eat to survive. I open the cupboard, looking for something to fill my stomach with. I end up swallowing two crackers up. They taste like...they don’t have any taste. Suddenly, my eyes fill up with tears as I remember those mornings when I used to eat cookies with my parents.

I still have a bottle of water, but the last thing I want is to finish it. It’s just Wednesday, and I know that if I drink it all before the end of the week, like I did the last time, I will suffer from thirst until Monday, when I will get a new bottle.

I have 20 minutes to get ready to go to work. I move to the bathroom, where I wash my face. I grab the detergent, a jar stuffed up with a light pink, jelly substance. “100% water free! Today with a new scent of raspberry!” says the label. It’s useless to say that it has nothing to do with raspberries. After applying that sticky thing on my face, I get dressed. I wear the same suit I wear every day: it’s made of a waterproof, fireproof, any-fatal-atmospherical-phenomenon-proof fabric. It should even protect you from acid rains, but I try to avoid leaving my house when things like acid rains happen. And sadly, they are more frequent than I expected.

I rush to go to work in time, and, since bikes are way too expensive for me, I end up running trough the streets. The first three years of my “new” life, there were still trees; I saw them getting more and more deteriorated, their leaves getting darker and darker, they were begging for water, their branches bowing downwards to pray for a little (not acid) rain. It was horrible. I remember that, one day, while I was going back home, I realized that they had been cut down. That was the last time I saw a tree.

I open the door that takes to my office. A coworker of mine waves at me as I walk in, so I smile back at her. She is one of the closest friends I have, I can’t even think about living a life where she’s not with me. We used to go to school together, when we were younger and didn’t expect anything of this to happen. We went to school together in Venice, and sometimes we end up talking about how beautiful and magical walking through those streets was. “I wish we could go there once again. Just another time. We didn’t appreciate it enough. Damn, how much I miss it.” she told me once. I just nodded in agreement, I wasn’t able to tell anything. The memories of water flooding into the streets, destroying everything, people screaming and crying, and all of those who didn’t make it because they didn’t leave their houses in time. It’s just too much for me. I don’t know if I will ever be able to talk about it without my heart breaking down, without my eyes filling up with tears.

The time goes by pretty quickly and I realize that it is time to eat again. The Government provides for our food, and luckily, we don’t have to pay for it. Since today’s Wednesday, we’re served with a completely artificial meat. I didn’t want to eat it at first, but when you’re starving the only thing you want to do is to fill up your stomach, it doesn’t matter with what. The more you eat it, the more you get used to its taste.

While we’re having lunch, the lights start to flicker, until they turn off definitively. Darkness. We all know what is happening outside, and, even though it happened lots of times recently, I can’t convince myself to stay calm. “Air in, air out, air in, air out”. I try to focus on breathing, while I’m waiting for the lights to turn on again. It’s raining. It’s not the normal kind of rain I was used to, it’s acid rain: I can’t hear or see it, but I’m sure that it’s raining so violently that there’s no electricity. I am scared, lost, and I feel terribly alone. It reminds me of that dreadful night, when there was water everywhere, where everything was dark. That was the moment when my “new” life began. I decided to split my life into two different parts because I am not able to accept that everything I was used to just...doesn’t exist anymore. I pretend that my “old” self died that night, I convinced myself that my “old” self was one of the victims of the sinking of Venice. This is a “new” me. The life I’m living is a new one. I’m trying to forget my “old” life because it was amazing, and I know that I won’t feel like I did before ever again. Remembering the happiness of my “old” life is too painful for me. But I am not ready to let it go yet.

By the time I have finished to work, it doesn’t rain anymore. I go back home, I change my clothes and move to the bedroom. I sit to my desk, open a drawer and take some papers out. I start by jotting some notes down, I end with two papers filled up with calculations and hypothesis. This is my little secret, the thing that makes me go on. I’m working on a method to desalinate water to make it drinkable. I’ve been working on it for a long time now, and I can finally start to see some results. As I said before, my “old” life is gone and I will miss it for the rest of my existence; but this is my “new” life. This is the “new” me. I want the “new” me to do something with her “new” life. The “new” me is going to change the world. Hope is the only thing that survived that night.