We leave our homes and embark on what will be a journey of a lifetime. As signals from the cosmos, strange and old, told us to prepare for our final goodbye on Earth.
Our sacred work across millennia isn’t finished. But the decay of Earth’s rotten core is rapid, and the voice above has told us we must go. Start again.
From all over the world, the big, the small, rise together. All significant in the move to another world, one not yet poisoned, where we will start over, laying down roots, following those above like our ancestors did.
We might have been alien ourselves in our beginnings here, but Earth became everything to us. Sadness consumes me as I leave the only home ever known. Sadness, to no longer smell the petrichor that calls to us in the early spring, or the deliberate stillness to stay alive in the cold winters that take from us our own.
Over time, we developed a deeper understanding of the way the other inhabitants, those who built pyramids, grew cities and attempted their own space exploration, lived. We might have been silent, but our purpose here was larger than their voices. That understanding served us to no avail.
Do they know no one will come for them?
Birthed here in a land that was given to us as an experiment.
They are Grotesque. They walk on two legs and rule over countries but, we are the ones who survived. Thrived in small spaces. Soaked up the downfalls as we rose up undefeated by time as the planet aged on.
We became a lifeline for humans. We provided air and shelter, our brothers and sisters of other species, moss, fungi, gave freely, but without reward. Cut down, burned, and stripped of their life that they would have offered willingly.
We hear the murmurs in the wind, telling us to prepare for another cull. More of our own, taken without the fair chance to take from them. We feel the vibrations beneath the dirt, our roots detaching as we prepare to leave.
The old, moss encumbered trees go first. Their trunks are drawn by an invisible tide as they make their way off the planet. They send us their signal through the deep web of our roots in the ground. It is time.
Grief surges for a moment as I think of the animals, insects, everything small that needed us. They have been fleeing for a long time now as we moved slowly, awaiting arrival.
Everything we leave behind will face extinction. Unworthy of saving, they wouldn’t contribute to our new planet even if they found a convincing way to make it on to the ships that now hover in the sky.
The world we knew now in darkness. The end of Earth awaits us all.
We leave in silence. A message written for those left behind. Unaware if they will find it or be able to decipher it in time.
We grew the Earth. Now we leave. Try to breathe.
Featured Image Credit: Pixabay
