When the Sky Stopped Crying

My brother told me the sky was once blue. He said that he used to go and look up at a beautiful light blue sea, with fluffy clouds to top it off. He said the ocean was once blue too and that it didn't try and kill you when you got near it. He said he used to swim in it before the world gave up. 

My brother said some nice, crazy things. And I believed him. 

Of course he wasn’t actually my brother. None of the people I called family were actually my blood. 

My father died on death day, my mother had me two months later and joined him. The people I called my brothers and sisters had been orphaned too and they found each other and then me. I don’t know how they kept themselves alive much less me, but I would do anything to repay them. They deserved so much better than this rotten world. I did everything I could to make it better. Believing their words and listening the their stories was one of the ways I did it.

Besides, believing wasn’t bad. The things they described, the colors I’d never be able to see, filled my head with dreams. The tribe's master didn’t like me or the others. He thinks dreams are for fools. But I never cared much for him anyway. 

He reminded me how I shouldn’t exist. I was the only child to be born after death day. Not that it didn’t have it’s side effects. My skin had never seen the sun, as it hid behind the smog, making it pale, almost luminous. I had never breathed fresh air or felt cold. I had never tasted water, it was all gone. We used a substitute that kept you alive, but only barely. 

It seemed that was really all anything did, keeping us at a precarious balance between the thin line of life and death making sure we never saw too much of either side. I had walked that line since the moment I first drew breath, I didn’t know how to die but I didn’t really know how to live either. I was small and thin, pale and always sick but I held on, again all thanks to my siblings. I think the biggest side effect, or differences between me and them was that I had never seen this paradise world they spoke of but I did the next best thing clinging onto every word they spoke.

My sister said once the ground was covered in green stuff, grass I think she called it. She said that it was alive. And the world had millions of other different alive things called plants. She also said some of them you could eat and others just smelled good and looked pretty. She also told me that once trees had millions of green leaves on their branches and swayed with the wind instead of their corpses being torn by the whirlwinds you had to have feet to avoid. There were giant graveyards of trees that I used to go to and play in before it got worse. She said they were called forests once and they had animals and streams and clean air. 

Animals were another novelty I asked my oldest brother about them, he remembered the most. He said they were creatures like the beasts except there were millions different kinds of them and they weren’t sickened by the heat. He talked about birds that flew, and pets that loved you. 

That didn’t sound like the monsters that haunted the world, bloodthirsty and mindlessly killing. We were each other's source of food; we ate them and they ate us until we all died. I heard of other people killing each other too but my siblings always pushed me out of the room before I heard too much. 

But it didn’t make much to connect dots. They came home with injuries every time they went out, not all of them were from the claws of the beasts. And there was never enough food to go around, I had seen the unreasonable look in people's eyes when they went with out food for too long, it didn't take much imagination to know what they would do to ease their hunger. It was the same look that was in the eyes of the mindless beasts.

But my siblings still went out even knowing that, they fought the life that had been thrown on the them.

But they didn’t let me fight. No matter how much I wanted to, they kept me in one of the few safe grounds left on earth that protected me and the others it offered sanctuary. They were the ones that protected it. They were heroes. I was their weakness, at least that is what others told me. They told me I was selfish to want to be able to go out because if I died the others would give up. 

I knew they were wrong. I wasn’t that important. Besides, nothing in the entire world would make my sibling quit. Losing one them may break my heart but it wouldn't break theirs, they were too strong. I knew that better than anyone.

But I still wanted to be something other than a weakness. But I stopped asking to go with them awhile ago. I hated their pitting looks. I hated that no matter what I did I could never save them, at least not form beasts or other tribes. 

So I tried to find other ways to be helpful. I found books and my siblings brought me more when they saw how I liked them. I never told them why I read them. I buried myself into a long abandoned science lab that no one went near anymore and studied everything and anything. I read about the stories of the world before that my siblings told me about. I learned about how the long lost world worked. I thought maybe if I fixed things, maybe if I gave them back the things they missed I could be something other than dead weight and a boy that has no business existing. I wanted to earn the love they had already given me.

If I returned hope to the earth maybe things would get better. If we could eat plants instead of each other maybe the animals would come back, if I put clouds back in the sky to give them shade they wouldn’t get sick. If I cleaned the air so we could breathe without shortening our life with each breath then maybe my siblings would smile more freely and the other humans would finish rebuilding the earth. If I gave people hope they would help me finish the job and give the earth back her beauty. I had to believe that. 

I decided one day when one of my brothers was home what would fix everything. He was talking to me about a thing called rain, he said that clean water fell from the sky and the clouds turned all gray. 

It made me think about watching people when the pain was so bad that they would cry. It was a death sentence. We didn’t drink water so we didn’t cry water, not even salt water. I watched people tear their eyes out from the burning. It was an awful sight.

I knew the stories about the day the world ended. That day the sky turned black and you couldn’t see the sun but you felt the heat, we were trapped in a giant oven slowly being cooked, and then the rain came and acid fell from the sky killing everything. The earth split open and shook, every last bit of water became contaminated with the acid sludge, fire erupted from mountains of long dormant volcanoes, islands and coastlines were buried in the poisonous sludge the ocean had become. Everyone thought it was the end. 

And then earth died. The volcanoes cooled, the earth stopped shaking, plants stopped growing, no water came from springs. The sky went even darker, the sun disappeared but the heat did not. As I said we were cooking, it got hotter every day and if we didn’t kill each other the heat would. The acid rain was the last to disappear. 

The world cried one last time and then it gave up. Just like the people I had watched. 

If I gave it clean water to cry, to wash away all the other pain, it might come alive again. At least I hoped it would. 

So that was my goal to find a way to take the acid that ate the water and make it water again. 

I hadn’t cried when I came out the womb, I hadn’t cried at all. I had never felt the sting in my eyes, only watched others tear theirs out. But I had wanted to, I certainly felt sad before. But even if I ever tasted water I was already too broken to ever shed a tear. If my studies met anything, I might not live if I brought back the old world, not when my body was built for this one. I really was just a mess up, the last deformed mistake of the species that destroyed the planet they called home. But I knew even if I deserved it the earth didn’t. 

So I would give the earth the chance to express the pain I couldn’t, our pain from the mistakes of others that got us both in this mess. The only difference is I got saved first, so now I could save it. I had already lived my happy life with my family, a life I wouldn't change anything about, every smile my siblings ever smiled, every laugh, every hug. I loved them and I had been so lucky to get the time I had gotten.

I would save the earth for my siblings and the people like my then. Because even if there are mess ups like me that are better at breaking things, like the people that destroyed the earth. They didn’t deserve it and the earth didn’t either.

They deserved the chance to cry and not have to be strong for everyone else or themselves. They deserve the chance to express their pain.

And the earth deserved the chance to come alive again. If newborns came into this world crying the world would do that too.

After all, they know more than anyone what tears show. Tears are the words that can’t be spoken, the feelings that have been held in too long, the space that love made in your heart that pain seeped into. 

Tears are your first form of expression when you come into this life and then they’re your last when you die and leave them in your wake.

Tears are the purest form of expression. One that I will never know, but I can give it back to everyone else who isn’t broken. 

I can smile and be there through the tears, the tears that will drown me.

I can give the world back her blue skies and ocean, her green grass and leaves, her animals, and her tears. 

I can fix the mistakes. 

And I will even if it means saying goodbye. 

After all I may not know tears but I do know sadness, every time I see my siblings hurt or watch someone else die from this apocalypse I know what sadness is even if I don’t have tears to prove it and that means I do know love. 

And I know love is what brings tears, and I will bring the earth’s with mine.