You Won't Remember

For Earth Day 2025

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by

Claudia Befu

and

Julie Gabrielli

, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists

Jonathan Tonkin

and

between two seas

. The story you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special

Top In Fiction

Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher

Erica Drayton

.

You won’t remember what it’s like to wake in the early morning hours in the first days of Spring to the warbling, whistling counterpoint of a pair of blackbirds reveling outside your bedroom window in darkness.

You won’t remember the way a spray of honeysuckle blossoms fills your senses and clings to you for miles down the trail like the memory of a dream of a first kiss before you understood such things.

You won’t remember the cool shade of a Sycamore tree or what it felt like to sprawl in the grass in the dappled sunlight filtering through its leaves as they tremble and wave, breathing you in and giving you life.

You won't remember any of this because you haven't happened yet, and the lush, green, impossible wonder of the world I knew and squandered will only be a story I tell you from my fading memory as useless to you as a butterfly pinned to a card with a label that fixes a word to an idea but fails to capture the delicate, swirling, trance of flight.