Green Space

Please respect and appreciate the last vestiges of the environment!

          Every day I see green. Bright lime green, brown-green, yellow-green, blue-green; but all of them somehow harsh and artificial. I see green every day, but I had never experienced green. After twenty years of false green I wanted something else, a genuine green like in the old stories I read out of big dusty books in the back of the library. I wanted to experience the warm green of sun filtered down through the leaves of a tall tree (I found a picture in one of the books once), or the strange dull green of lichen on a rock (which is something like spotty cement, or so I gathered), or the live bright green of grass (which I figured out is some sort of organic ground covering).

            And then, one day long after my first discovery of the idea of genuine green, as I walked down the stairs from my apartment building to the sidewalk, I saw it. In an out-of-the-way crack in the cement stairs hid a small spot of fuzz. Green fuzz. I examined it closely for a moment and sprinted to the library.

            My mind buzzed while I searched for the botany book on the decrepit back shelves. My first real green, perhaps the last genuine green in the whole world. In the botany book I found a small, dark green, fuzzy plant: moss. Moss. I savored the word all the way home. Moss. Up the stairs. Moss. Into my apartment. Moss. I grabbed the novel I was currently reading, jumped back down the stairs, and sat on the cement in the sun to read. I stroked the moss with a single finger as I read.

            Moss. Suddenly I could see the greens of the forests and fields in the old novel better than ever before. My moss was a pristine green, something sacred, a window to the past. I read next to my moss all afternoon, and again the next day. Could it have been my imagination that the air felt cooler and cleaner when I sat there, the city smog hanging just overhead, but with my moss next to me?

            On the third day, I heard a strange rumbling on the street. I looked out my window. Much to my dismay, I spied one of the city’s trucks dousing my building’s steps with some sort of chemical spray. When the truck finally left, I rushed down to the stairs and scrutinized every cranny of the concrete, but my moss was nowhere to be found. I cried then because my green space, the last green space in the world, was gone.

Reviews

[C. Rose]

Wonderful. Great fixation on green without feeling repetitive. "long after my first discovery" I would recommend cutting for clarity and simplicity. Consider adding a line about how the pictures in books of plants hinted at genuine green but the chemical inks lacked something.
Overall an enjoyable read :)

[DaughterNature]

Thanks! Glad you liked it :)
This was actually one of my earliest pieces (from way back in high school), but I still really like it.