EVOLUTION

After the meteors robbed the earth of its glory, life decided to brew again with all its might. Organisms never gave in to destruction. The sun thought she would wipe away the ball of oceans and mountains that circled her. But the minuscule cells won against her fire. Life reemerged with its raging stubbornness.

I got to know of such rebirth and determination from my curriculum books. However, I couldn't witness such thing before me when the history was unfurling yet again. Where was the stubbornness of living organisms that I was made of?

The year is 3049, and the light in my room is a bright shade of teal. I'm swiveling on my leathered chair. The leather is a clean shade of white like that of a horse cruising through the English villages. Our adapted skins are of that exact shade now. I glance at the fern beside my wall-sized window, perched on a wire laced bowl of soil. It reminds me of the life earlier- how our kind was diverse, how humans with different coloured skins co-existed, how we had a sun and enough green as lifelines, and the list goes on. Now we've made a place for ourselves in a planet-less void for human brains are destined to weave wonders. Now we live among the stars and falling meteors that often crash right into the earth. We have drawn the remaining essence out of the earth for survival which is now a ball of dead soil- full of heat or lava, I don't know. We have become monochromatic- forgotten how it was like to boast a darker hue.

"Spacecraft K21 is ready for a trip to Earth. Confirm?" a feminine voice wafts through the artificial, cold air of my room. The voice reminds me of my once breathing mother whose skin is now probably a part of the molten rocks. And the name "Earth" reminds me of the scorching heat blowing through the neighbourhood during summer, pervasive rainfalls, chilly winters, indigo oceans, godlike mountains, and of course, true air.

I reply with a yes, and the sensor inside my flesh-like all of our kind now- receives the signal and the same voice adds, "Initiating K21 in 3 minutes." Then I put on an oxygen mask to board the craft and wonder what an inferno of a place the earth might be right now.

I get in the spacecraft and witness mammoth masses of diamond-like stones aimlessly lingering in the void. 

"Launching in 3,2,1," a voice radiates from the radio sitting on the dashboard while I contemplate how "Earth" is just a name now. So are the other things that I took for granted. I'm afraid my neurons will quietly forget all the feelings attached to those names someday. The warmth of the sun, the freshness of soil, the calmness of air, the touch of the ocean- all the sensations will be wiped off my modified neurons. I don't want my neurons to set them loose. I'm afraid. 

How could stubbornness give in to destruction?

The writer is a grade 11 student of Birshreshtha Noor Mohammad Public College.