Paradise

• Mikayla Branch-spence, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2015

Before me, I see colour.

The azure, glistening agony of the sea roils with life, glittering with hues of scarlet passion and magenta pleasure, shining like beaten gold on the rounded tips of the waves. The slow murmur of the sky flashes with wild sketches of soft, golden spires in the frozen clouds, lapis lazuli jealously clinging to the fire as the night melds it to velvet. The sky shines like golden pollen, ravaging colours swirled ever moving yet ever still, a ceased roar of the sky that sounds so musically silent, fiery orange with the musings of sweetest yellow and lustful reds, a mirage of violet dreams entrapped in an empire of shattered clouds.

The sky above is clear and dark, like a looking glass reflecting the cerulean shadows of the deepest forest; eternally full but pure and empty. The stars shimmer above, watchful eyes in the oncoming night.

I can almost smell sea spray, the dash of brine that tempers the cool air, the purity of the oxygen surrounding me, gesturing for my lungs to breath deeply and just live.

For is this paradise not enough? The most ravaging beauty painted in a single instant of eternal time, lovely yet haunting- is it not enough to witness the wonder of the world in all its natural beauty, uncontrollable and wild, emotional, musical, silent and mysterious, in only one second of endless moments to come?

I let my hand fall, and the dusty picture of what has once been falls with it. The salt and the clear air in the peeling photograph evaporate into reality, and my breath catches on the grime in my lungs.

Before me, I see dust.

The crumbling ruins of an advanced world, with no time for beauty, blind to all excepting what serves their hunger. The hammer of greed, jealousy and selfishness has left nothing behind.

The sky echoes sickly and grey, with nothing but haze as far as the eye can see. The ocean, drowned in human gluttony, is empty, devoid of anything but darkness. Clouds, once a motionless eddying of grand architecture, fall to the ground in dry rain.

Nothing is left but dust and decay. The earth, withered under its broken shell, is silent.

The paradise of ignorance and greed, the kingdom of more, is no more. Life exists only in wires; spasmodic, mute screams of numbers and letters in the shattered screens that scar the hollow ground. Paper money flutters lifelessly and crumbles to grime upon the ground amongst the ruins of human wealth.

All around is nothing.

Is this paradise enough?