The Last World

After the café and the swings you said, ”Mummy, is this the last world? After this one, will there ever be another one?”

Your innocent wondering may have been Super Mario inspired, but it stopped me cold in my tracks. All my guilty plane tickets, all my kilometres driven and all the plastic items I ever bought came over me right there, like a huge dirty tidal wave.

Of regret.

I am sorry I haven’t done more to save your last world, love. I don’t know how, or I do I guess, but it seems next to impossible as a choice. You don’t have to but I hope you can forgive me one day. I haven’t tried hard enough.

There’s no other world for you honey, this is it. This is what I’m leaving you. It looks beautiful and peaceful today, but it’s going to become harder to live in.

I hope you’ll be strong enough, I hope you can stay kind and caring if things get difficult. I hope after it gets worse, it gets better. A lot better, better than we could ever design or plan for, or indeed make happen.

We are not a great generation that saves you and your world. We are the bad guys: the selfish, the stubbornly ignorant and the lazy. The image-anxious. The corrupt and the power hungry.

I see you get to know the world around us, I can see how exciting and beautiful it is for you. I see you study the stars and I want to see them through your eyes. I want to see them through your kids’ eyes, and their kids’. I want them to study and stand on the rooftop and look at stars, because everything down here is fine, and they can – why couldn’t they?

‘There’s no other planet where people can live, dear’, I say gently, squeezing your little hand a bit tighter. But of course, your busy little mind has already moved on.