Among the many futures that can possibly happen after you finish reading this line. There is one where the environment has collapsed, the air is always dry and water is an ultra expensive commodity. Every person gets a defined amount of wet air and water they can spend for their lifetime. In this future, people hide their tanks with water and air in deep vaults down below in the underground. Outside of the bubble cities there are rumours of criminal bands that steal the water of freshly killed bodies. Even grandmas restrain themselves from kissing babies, because every wet kiss has a price, and the price of the saliva on a couple of kisses is higher than the rent.
I talk to you from this desert grey maze. But on the grey maze I see a little green island floating through the dry concrete. The island is my uncle Gerardo. While people horde water and resources. My uncle spends them all in his future garden. It will be a public garden. A garden for everyone. I help my uncle with some of the work for his garden. It is a very important project, a garden to make the city less dry.
The sun burns our skins, but it does not matter. My uncle makes jokes, and me and all the other people working forget about what we do and we just watch him talking and making jokes. My uncle seems grumpy but in reality he is in really good mood, he calls everyone retarded, but being called retarded by my uncle is a sign that in reality he loves you. Unless you really are a moron. In which case you probably are a politician or another profession that morons like to choose.
Time passes and my uncle comes and goes with his plants inside his big aquarium tank. He checks on me from time to time, makes sure I am doing ok, he calls me an idiot, makes more jokes and disappears with his plants.
One day I receive a letter from my uncle with a small bottle inside. The letter explains that my uncle is no longer there. He is dead. He is gone and the little parts that made him are all gone to his garden. All parts of him taken to feed his plants. I feel sad. And then I feel sad again because I realise I will not hear my uncle joke again. In the letter my uncle calls me retarded and tells me to cry in the little bottle so that I can give some water to the jasmines that are looking a bit down.
I smile like an idiot because just then I realised that the garden that my uncle grew has roots that do not live inside pots. It is a garden with roots that can not die from not having water. A garden with trunks that move between the people on their way to the market, with leaves facing happy towards the warm sun, and with roots and veins drinking together from the same blood. Blood of people like us, the people that remember.
