It was the colour that caught Lowry's eye. A shade of colour that she wasn't sure she had ever seen before. A vibrant light blue, saturated and glossy. There had been times where she wouldn't have given it any more attention than a cursory glance, but those were 'the before-times'. She thought the description was silly. Trying not to acknowledge the situation they were in and how they got there wasn't going to be helpful to anybody. Nature had reclaimed what people had taken from it, leveling cities and reshaping itself around the toxicity that they had left behind. Plants that ate plastics, animals that thrived around radioactivity, and of course, again and again, the weather.
Lowry was just old enough to remember having to downsize. First came the cars, mostly because the roads had been overgrown by plants faster than they could push back, then the planes, as there were fewer and fewer places to land. She had never had the opportunity to fly a plane, but she had noticed the sudden lack of them crossing overhead. Certain shops began closing as the logistics network broke down, then as services became impossible to render, or there was no point in even offering them. The houses were perhaps the most difficult thing to let go. Lowry's family had tried their best to hold on for as long as they could, but for several months, the writing had been on the wall. The rapid changes of weather had worn down the facade of most residential buildings, often storms had blown out the windowpanes, floods had weakened the foundations, rapid changes of temperature had flexed the interiors apart from the isolation and pipes. The house that had looked less than a decade old in her earliest memories had aged rapidly. By the time they had decided to leave, the roots of the surrounding trees and shrubs had begun choking the foundation, which had tilted the floors, threatening to collapse the whole structure around them. No amount of hacking at the plants creeping closer and closer would make a difference at that point. Humans had simply stopped being the fastest acting collective at scale. Since then, signs of what humans had considered civilization had grown increasingly sparse. Most things that people didn't wear directly on their person was swiftly subsumed by the wildlife or swept into the water. The available landmass had gone back drastically, squeezing a population that had been concerned about the lack of space, into a much tighter space. They made do. It fit, more or less. It turned out that when golf courses, private mansions and parking lots were removed, there was more than enough space.
Lowry was always on the move. She didn't like contending with the rapid changes in environments that came with staying at one location. Some preferred to remain stationary, stick to a community trying their best. She would rather travel with the land. It introduced a different constancy in comparison to sticking to one place. The sudden growth spurts of plants made it difficult to predict how long any place would look the same, but in the span of eight hours, even the plants couldn't surprise her too terribly. So she moved from place to place, looking for places with slight elevation, that was dry and far enough from large bodies of water that could move toward her in her sleep. She would put up a tent and fix it in a tree. Sometimes she could spot a settlement from there, which she would visit the following day to trade for tools or spices. Food and water, if one wasn't too picky, had returned to the land with abundance. Little of it was especially refined, but it made trading for food itself somewhat of an absurdity. Spices though, as a luxury, were a popular means of payment.
Lowry plucked at the glossy, blue thing in between the brush. It was a leaflet. It had been years since she had seen a leaflet. Paper had never been particularly difficult to reintroduce to nature, so when the production sites of paper had stopped working, they had run out relatively swiftly, finding alternatives as they moved along. Scribbles were made on bark and records kept on clay. Leaves had gotten large enough to more or less serve as replacements for most other uses of paper. Advertising had been abandoned as a practice, so few had made an attempt to replace leaflets. The leaflet advertised something called the "Brenton Highrises", which Lowry was certain had long since collapsed, if it had ever been built. She had little interest in the text itself, but the colour was captivating. In an age of strictly natural dyes and where the synthetic colour of clothes was fading out of the fabric with every time they were cleaned, a colour so bright was a rare sight. She slipped it into the worn, distressed backpack. She likely wouldn't be able to trade it or use it for anything. Perhaps she'd get some joy out of looking at it every now and then, a memory of how things had been, contained in a saturated leaflet blue.
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