My entry for the #PlanetOrPlastic writing contest.
Bernard tells a story about his new world created by the menace called Pollution.
Plastics pollution has a direct and deadly effect on wildlife. Thousands of seabirds and sea turtles, seals and othe...
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I am Bernard and I am currently living in a time called the era of recovery. It is a time where people are trying to survive in the harshest weather and environment known to man. It is a time where the people of the world started realizing their mistakes and started trying to fix them. Those that could not, just tried to outlive them.
Life expectancy was on a staggering low. People that lived above the age of forty were seen and treated like kings or more like mini-gods.
Climatic laws had the worst penalties in the state. You can't afford to break them. Defaulters were treated like murderers. I have more than three friends serving long sentences due to their care-free attitude or should I say ignorance.
One of the strict laws with high penalties is being placed on dumping refuse, especially plastics of any kind.
But that is all medicine after death.
Sometimes I look at the pictures of my dad and mom sitting down by the once cherished River Dant. The smile on their faces as they pointed at the river was priceless. Images like that often make me wonder, where it all went wrong.
Like a dying patient in the hands of an inept doctor, we lost one of our biggest gifts of nature. It was all thanks to our lackadaisical attitude to our fragile ecosystem.
I took another sip from my coffee and then I looked at the pictures on the pamphlet of the once glorious river. Fantasies of what my world should look like echoed in my head. It was hard to believe that I was in a museum to see the last living fishes in our town, a family of Caranx in an aquarium.
The feeling is worse than drowning in your worst nightmare.
The soft tunes of the ocean kept on playing from my headphones as tears rolled down my cheek. Sincerely, I still hope that I will visit a river one day and maybe find one or two marine life swimming happily. That farfetched dream is the only thing that helps me through days like this.
I removed the headphones from my ears and then I looked around, before getting up from my seat. I took the pamphlet from the table and then I dusted the crumbs off my green sweater.
The show is about to start.
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