2 minute read
The Environmentalist
Ella Matticks
Mary wakes up at 7:00 in the morning, still tired after napping for a few hours, and bikes to her job, where she spends her time trying to create a renewable energy source to power the world. For lunch, she eats only the fruits and vegetables that she has grown in her backyard. “Don’t you get sick of eating the same thing every day?” asks her coworker, who must have asked the same question a thousand times before.
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“I’m willing to endure anything, as long as it’s for a good cause” is always Mary’s eager reply.
Her coworker approves of her answer with a smile and says, “Thanks for saving our planet.”
After work, Mary meets her friend, John, in the park.
“You ready for today’s haul?” John asks. ”It feels like the more trash we pick up off the ground, the more there is the next day.”
“Think of how bad it would be if we didn’t spend hours picking up all this garbage every day. The whole park would be a pile of garbage,” Mary replies, ecstatic to begin her work with John.
“That’s true. It just sucks that people treat the planet this way. Some people are scum.”
“You’re totally right, John. That’s why we can never stop cleaning this park together. Five hours a day I have to pick up trash in a park with a complete loser,” she says as she hip checks him flirtatiously. She wonders if he knows how she feels about him. They pick trash up off of the ground for five solid hours, until the park is spotless.
John says he’s going to call it a day, and Mary decides to go home as well. Mary takes all the bags of trash she and John have collected, and dumps it into her large garbage bins at home. Biking, it takes several trips to get all the trash to her house. Mary sits on the couch and watches documentaries about deforestation and CO2 emissions, eats her standard vegan dinner that she grew herself in her backyard, and heads to bed at 10:00.
Mary feels groggy when her alarm goes off at 4:00 AM. She crawls out of bed, slips on shorts and a T-shirt, and walks to her backyard to pick her breakfast of blueberries and strawberries. Then she walks into the kitchen nervously. No matter how many times she does it, it never stops being scary to her. What if I get caught? She thinks, Would he find out?
She grabs all of the garbage that she and John spent so long picking up, along with the small amount of garbage she has created in her house. She goes into her garage, where she puts the garbage into the bed of her truck. I hate how bad this truck probably is for the environ- ment, she thinks to herself. Unfortunately, it’s all she could afford that was big enough to fit all of her garbage. She got it at a yard sale for 400 dollars, so it was in terrible shape, and had even worse fuel efficiency. Nonetheless, Mary felt this had to be done.
Mary drives back to the park, drives over the curb, and parks her car in the middle of the grass. She gets out of her car, hesitates for a moment, peers around, and then begins throwing all of the garbage into the park. Periodically, she drives the truck to another spot, attempting to spread the massive amount of garbage evenly throughout the park.
“Some people are scum.” John’s words echo in her head, getting louder and louder until she can hardly stand it. But this is for a good cause. John doesn’t know it… but it is… she tries to justify it any way she can.
Tears stream down Mary’s face as she drives home consumed by guilt. She feels terrible, but she believes it was the right thing to do. One day, she thinks, one day he will be mine… one day he will realize how incredible I am. When Mary gets home, she cries herself back to sleep as the sun rises. She wakes up at 7:00 in the morning, still tired after napping for a few hours.
