Vines and earthquakes.

The vines, earths tangled hair, a beautiful mess of emerald knots rooted so strongly up the sides of trees and the faces of buildings. It is framework strong enough to climb, to grip in my ivory fingers and pull my tired frame up from the weary world. They hold so firmly to that rough red Victorian brick, almost desperately, clinging to anything that will help them closer to the sun. My grandmother warned me away from the vines, told me it wasn’t safe to climb, but I climbed the vines in their search for the sun. I refused to believe my grandmother in her quest for my safety. I had always been a stubborn child, and the vines were like-minded in their roots. I trusted the vines, their mass of green and leaves were as knotted as my blonde hair, they were my kin. I climbed their lengths to the top of that Victorian building and looked out over the rolling Pacific Ocean, and I knew why the vines reached higher so desperately. I knew as I felt the heat of the sun caress my face. I sighed like the wind and inhaled the salty scent of sea breeze, and I knew this was home. 1

The ground we once sought solid trembles weakly now beneath the merciless sonic pressure, it shakes and ripples as flimsy as water beneath the wrath of quaking earth. City building we thought invincible were uprooted, bluntly rejected as nature took a turn. Peaceful pillars bowed and proud building toppled, and humanity, dwarfed by its creations, was destroyed by their own fallibility. The human world became a shifting maze of rubble and ruins as nature tilled the soil like ox and farmer tilled for planting seeds. I stood at the edge of this world and witnessed all this play out dramatically, like a scene in a movie before me. All I could think was of how the earthquake reminded me of the way my lover made me tremor and replenished me. The earthquake was truly the soil alive.