A Letter to the Past (Sequel of "They Cutting Down the Big Trees")

She went to the storage room to clean it and there, she found a box with a color that's hard to distinguish because of the thick dust covering it. She brushed the cobwebs attached to it, blew the dust and opened the box.  Inside it was the wrapper of her very first Krispy Kreme, her very first cinema ticket, her very first admission pass to the circus and basically her keepsakes. What caught her eyes were the creased piece of pad paper, the color of a dry leaf. She touched the paper as if searching for something on its surface, placed the paper on the left pocket of her jeans and started to clean.

After cleaning the storage room, she get the paper out of her pocket, opened it and read the innocent writings. After reading it, she held it tight with her arms to her heart. She turned her laptop on but stopped for a moment then decided to get a ball point pen and a paper pad in the storage room. When they were in her tired and wrinkled hands, she sat in the dining table and took a deep breath. Writing the traditional way, that means with paper and pen, was something she was not used to for a long time already and this was what she wrote.

Hi, eight-year-old Stacy! This is forty-nine-year-old Stacy and yes I am the future you and you are the past me. I had read your composition way back July 5, 2011 about your lesson that day about the bad effects of cutting big trees. Sadly, those bad guys not only kept on cutting down the big trees but burned fossil fuels and built factories and all those shut downed Mother Earth and put her inside a kettle with boiling water in it. Stacy, the effects of it and the destruction of nature are more horrible than the ugly monsters, ghosts and beasts Mum scares you with.

I envy you so much because you have free fresh air specially in the province because here, we wear masks that purify the air that enters our noses. Our environment now is far from yours due to the burned fossil fuels used in big factories and in ever growing number of vehicles. If the little birds and the sweet, yellow sunshine wakes up every morning then what wakes us up now is the noisy chug-chug of the train, the busy buzz of the vehicles and the sick, gray light from the sun's rays. You have a garden in the backyard, right? You better make the most out of it because now, we don't have any garden except for the Domes because plants can't live under normal conditions; moreover, here, plants are grown in large Domes, a place owned by the government sealed to be protected from the very hot temperature.

Coats and long sleeves are never in the trend nowadays because the temperature is just way, way up. White Christmas is just up to the pictures now because snow never occurred since 2020 and there's no more snow caps, avalanches and glaciers in snow-coated mountains because all those snows and ices already melted. And it resulted to higher sea levels. You know, Stacy, you just have to consider yourself as the luckiest girl in the world being able to see real penguins, tigers, seals and eagles even just in the zoo and owning, Guardian, your Siberian husky. My children had never seen them because they are already extinct and so are the endangered animals in your time.

Stacy, I'd give everything to be you again. Even if it means leaving all these comfort of technology, I'd still do. I failed to protect the environment but I've done my best. Do tell them to care before it's too late. I guess I'll stop here and by the way, the year now is 2052.

She sighed - deep. She closed her weary eyes, folds starting to show up in her forehead and in the corners of her eyelids. Memories of her childhood came rushing like racing horses. The first drop of her tears fell from her left eye and soon, the whole room was filled with the sound of her sob. But her sob was inaudible among the noisy cry of the gray scale, metallic, high tech city.