The Backwaters by Paloma Ruiz

Dear Thomas,

I am writing home to tell you that my hair has changed. It is short now. And I would like you to celebrate me. If you can? I have read that the planet is doing just fine. That none of the bad things have happened like they said they would. All the water is sitting in all the same places. All the air is just as warm. The insects have not evolved to outlast us. There is no need, as we are lasting. You had always told me it would be the same, forever. And it’s true.

I have seen images of the deep sea. There are certain websites for this, in which you can enter anonymous chat rooms and stare at the invertebrates, those ghostly carbon membranes at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench. Sometimes people watch live streams of these, recorded by unmanned automatic submarines, and masturbate. It is good to feel that you are intimate with the very center, the very slime mold of the earth. Obviously, I watch more often for reasons of research. If you’d like to know, the bottom of the ocean looks the same as it always has. The TJ Maxx shopping bags and non-biodegradable mascara wands and tampon applicators are there sometimes, but the video resolution is low enough that they barely leave a mark between the pixels. And anyway, they have always been there. I have come to believe they were there far before us, and it was in hubris that we pretended they were ours. Perhaps they even grew there. Why not.

If you would like to show Amelia a photo of the seafloor, I have attached several JPEGs. Let me know if her eyesight has developed such that she can discern the threshold for 300dpi, and I will gladly resend as TIFFs through a large file share platform of your choice. For now, I have chosen the images with high contrast and minimal noise disruption, and also those which sparked lively debate within the chat room. I thought that as a bedtime story, if she’s amenable, you could read her these corresponding transcripts which I have scrubbed diligently of profanity and sexual innuendo for exactly such purposes: