The blank paper stares back craving my deliverance, but surrender doesn’t come alone. Like greenhouse gas emissions penetrating our atmosphere, altering her being, the grief I hold penetrates deep into my psyche, into the part of the stomach that holds safe my anxieties. I don’t want my being altered by admitting the reality that our climate is.

Like words on the paper, if I fail to write, maybe the climate impacts will fail to realize, maybe my feelings of despair will dissipate as the science alarm bells ringing will silence. As with the fires and the floods. The reality of our changing climate and the solutions put forward are understood and accessible, but the push towards action is not black and white. Billionaires still need to make a profit, politicians still need to satiate their power base, consumers want to believe that material success is virtuous.

But black and white has its place. Black and white on the paper, black and white that science dictates, black and white of non-believers who can’t see the change so it can’t be so. I wish writing about it held that logic. But alas, whether I paint the page black with pollution, whether I leave it white to proclaim humanity’s hollow purity, whether I hold it inside so deep to deny its voice, the climate is changing, and I am grieving.

My generation of Millennials and younger embrace a new existentialist question, no longer scouring Sartre or critiquing Nietzsche, we hold a different why, a louder why. Why did our parents pollute the planet knowingly? Why are oil executives and neoliberal governments not understanding that a dead planet can’t turn profits? Why are we responsible for a legacy dictated by colonialism and market expansion? Why is the world dying?

This past year held so many climate impacts, ranging from ravage wildfires in the West to startling ice storms in Texas to devastating hurricanes in the Northeast. Winter fires in my Coloradan backyard.

Our emissions are only rising.

And there is a known lag between when(if) we will reach carbon neutrality and when(if) the climate will stabilize.

And even if we did anything domestically, what about China and India’s growing populations and growing carbon contribution?

What about what’s already lost and already fated to be?

But I know it is coming, I know it has come. My grief for the future is just as forcing as my fears for tomorrow, for this afternoon, for yesterday. Staying silent only gaslights the realities that have already materialized.

***

6 am. It’s August but the sky is still dark. Confusion coats my morning grogginess. The clock ticks onward but the sun doesn’t come. 8 am. I can see a semblance of light. Obscured by prophetic clouds, the sky lightens to a bright orange; the dried grass a reddish hue. I used to love the smell of campfire smoke, until the smell accompanied falling ash and its meaning. A layer of dead trees hugs the deck. And the grass. And the tomato plants. I take the dog on leash lest he consume the toxic lye of intermingling ash and water. What of the forest creatures and their exposure? What of the houseless? Walking through filtered lenses, I can see the climate-altered future my professors told me would come in 20 years. I smell the climate-altered presence that shocks the state and the trees. I listen but only silence greets me as I question my senses and my sanity. Yesterday, I could see the sun.

My mother and I get in the car to go to the grocery store. The sky’s painted the orange of dying leaves. Daylight fog encapsulates the car as we pierce through the breath of lost lives. We drive in one of many carbon contributors, in one of many fuels to the great flame. I reach for the air conditioner as I do when anxiety finds my heartbeat, reaching for more fuel to ease my emissions. Ash swirls in, erasing our anthropocentric barrier shielding us from the reality that our home was burning. I turn it off. We put on masks. Thank goodness for COVID.

***

Every campfire smell, every orange sunset, every charred tree along the roadway. I’m immediately immersed in the two weeks where the climate held my hometown by its throat and demanded reparations for our profit-pursuing penetration, our planetary plunder for pleasure. That was summer 2020 in Salem, Oregon. Half a million across the state were displaced as a larger number of acres burned brightly. I still frighten when I feel the wind in summer’s heat—forewarning of fires in distant or near lands. I still see ash falling in winter’s first flurries.

But we weren’t in real danger. The three-ranked alarm system of “Ready, Set, Go” put neighboring counties on “Set” but the Willamette River protected Salem from even being told to ready ourselves for what? Houselessness? The loss of a lifetime accumulation of memories and keepsakes? The loss of security? Ready, set, go.

What will happen in years to come? Will my childhood home be spared again? Will the fires take more forests, more homes, more lives? Or will they continue to torment what’s already burned? Will they let us know? The fires and their selfish dominion over our land; ravaging; trailblazing through the forests, the farmlands, the small towns, the suburbs; following the path of least resistance. Burning indifferently in the shadow of the sun. I wonder where they learned it from.

***

I’ve since moved to Boulder, Colorado, another hotspot for flaming affairs.

When the smoke arrived on the front range last summer, I wasn’t scared. When the winds raced forward, carrying the scent of campfire, ominous and fateful, I didn’t bother. When horses whinnied with their knowing anticipation, their lungs corrupted by the ash of dying trees, I wasn’t panicked. I have been here before. I know the smell, I know the wind, I know the feeling of silence seeping in. Silence for the trees, silence for the birds, silence for the displacement and the burned. I wasn’t worried for my safety, because grief conquered my thoughts.

When the smoke shadowed over the hill that fateful winter Thursday, I wasn’t scared. The Marshall fire announced in her infancy, I watched from my back porch with as much ease as her will. The firefighters were on the scene and the smoke was concentrated. But hurricane-force winds held words unwritten.

When a strong gust took the flames east over the hill out of reach of the hoses, I was scared. Ready, Set, Go. And I was gone.

Thursday night stood long. Still unsure whether my home was standing, I couldn’t sleep. Thoughts swirled in my mind like fiery winds. Beating against my brain to replay how so many people already lost their homes. My heart pulled with sympathy for those facing a charred path amidst a pandemic surge the day before the year’s first impending winter storm. But I could be one of them. I had yet to know if my home and all its memories was alive or ash. I had yet to know if I would join the ranks of the newly houseless, if my home would become a statistic.

***

But I’m fine. My house is fine. Only the backyard was blackened, only the neighbors’ homes flattened. The chances of another suburban wildfire, displacing thousands of families in December during a pandemic are too unlikely to warrant worry.

And the other wildfires just tear through forests and farmlands, hardly a cause for concern.

But the fires still call. Taunting their rightful authority to blaze the land that humans blazed first. They declare their revenge.

But fires, you don’t know the complexities of ecosystem interaction. You don’t know the positive feedback loop of burning trees and disappearing carbon sinks. Of shadeless summers, of silent springs, Of airless air. You don’t know that humans are endangered when their energy source erupts in flames. You don’t know that knowledge disappears with the trees as all books go paperless. As all pages stay blank. But we don’t know either. If we did, we’d have never blazed first.

***

Every lightbulb left to blaze, every non-recyclable packaging, every full gas tank, I ease into the guilt of my carbon contribution. I rue the neoliberal indoctrination holding fast that individuals’ rational consumption dictates a healthy economy. That if we didn’t want climate change, we would opt for the solar panels the oil companies fought not to build; that if we didn’t want our soils depleted, we would eat organic foods that are still produced on soil-intensive monocultures and are overpriced and inaccessible to most consumers. The rationality of consumption—first manipulate us with your algorithm-induced behavior change, take away our options with your monopolizing means for competition annihilation, then tell us our consumption makes a difference, that our current system is dictated by my bank statement.

It’s humorous how our power-holders scoff at planetary protection when indoctrinated eyes see her only for her body—an object used and abused, penetrated for profit, profit for pleasure. Profiteering penetration precipitates planetary plunder. The p words. How insecure they must feel seeing femininity in the flowers and canyons, in tree openings and the shapes of aspen leaves. Georgia O’Keeffe has a knack for finding her flower amidst Washington monuments and space-colonizing rocket ships. But the fires and floods don’t discriminate. They burn all flowers; they drown all monuments.

***

How many words will die with the planet? How many memories never remembered? How much love never realized?

Fully grieving requires embracing uncertainty and acknowledging that our way of life is irreversibly changing for the worse. Fully grieving requires writing and educating and yelling from rooftops that we need to make change. Fully grieving requires holding on to the slivers of hope left behind by the We Are Still In pledge signed by 294 cities and counties across all 50 states, committing to the Paris Agreement and climate action. Fully grieving means holding onto the pockets of resilience as Colorado aspens still turn their goldish hue in September; holding onto the knowledge that disillusionment brings apathy brings stagnation brings catastrophe. To know that doomsday will come holds no place in preventing it.

I’m grieving for the future. For the past who sacrificed themselves for us to live. I grieve for the fallen firs from the Oregon wildfires last year, for my Coloradan community rebuilding in the face of trauma, the face of retribution, for the dying yellow cedars in Alaska, for the squirrels, polar bears, and ice caps—for all the beauty on this small marbled planet in the corner of the universe.

Grief is the sun not shining on an August morning. Grief is thousands displaced during the midst of a pandemic, fleeing from fires with only minutes to breathe. Grief is asking which photographs to take and which to leave behind. Which certificates and documents, which child’s art project. Grief is cradling the unfertilized eggs in your body wondering whether to bring beauty and life into a world full of fury and death. Wondering if your life will reach full fruition nonetheless an unborn child, nonetheless a born child. Grief is knowing only the unknown, finding assurance in uncertainty, searching for answers through forests of ash.

The pages are written, I am grieving.