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My routine gets me through the hardest days in the greenhouse. I wake up. I miss you. I make tea, and if the atmo readings allow, I spend 60 seconds outside watching the desert. I tend to our garden. I visit your sapling by the wading pond. Some mornings, the solitude wraps its arms around me for so long that I feel like I’ve fallen through a trapdoor inside myself and there is nothing below it. On those days, I lose myself in the soil. I dig troughs for old seeds and hope they will sprout, or calibrate the harvester to collect fresh seeds for the vault. You know the tenuous balance here in the greenhouse, trying to cradle the future in your hands without crushing it. I admit, I’ve let some duties slip. I still check the water filter, but the living quarters… it was easier to seal them off and sleep with the plants. Less air for the oxcycler to have to purify. I know you wouldn’t approve. One day, a silt storm or hailstone will crack the shielding and I’ll have nowhere to retreat to when the atmosphere creeps in. But I can only fight so hard to live in a world without you in it. So here I am, fighting the quiet fight. I wake up. I miss you. I make tea. I tend to our garden. I visit your sapling by the wading pond. I think of you down there in the soil, becoming roots and fungus and worms, and it makes me less scared. If the end should come, I will be with you in the earth, in the garden, in the harvester, in the seed vault. Someday, somehow, we will be planted back into the world. And with you in it, it will be a world worth fighting for again.
Short story written by Peter Chiykowski
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