En el corazón del bosque

At first, changes came so slowly that they became part of the fabric of everyday discomfort. The power cuts were sporadic and brief, nobody gave them much importance. But little by little they began to condition daily life, the hours in which you could put a washing machine or simply read. It seemed that no one wanted to see the outages get longer and longer, but one fine day the electricity did not return. By then there was no gasoline to be found, nor were planes to be seen in the sky. Nobody wanted to admit it and nobody seemed to accept it, but civilization, that of fossil fuels and the whirlwind of consumption, was collapsing. In fact, the Earth had screamed it for decades. Nell and Eva are sisters, they are seventeen and eighteen years old and live in the family home nestled in the woods outside of Redwood. Their parents educated them there, in the middle of nature, without going to school or institute, disobeying all conventions, believing above all in books and music. They wanted to offer them a fully and freely chosen existence, oblivious to the worst social demands, but they did not count on society as a whole to collapse. Maybe no one can count on that, maybe humans are like that. Perhaps that is why collapse is so difficult to recognize even in the midst of ruin, and perhaps that is why Nell and Eva retain their passions: Nell still hopes that Harvard entrance exams will be held again, and she prepares by reading everything find; Eva wants to dedicate herself to dance and rehearses every day, although she can no longer put on music, playing each composition in her head. However, in the face of the unknown that is yet to come, both will have to recognize that no government, no energy company, is going to give them back the life they believed was theirs. In reality, their life, their new life, is already in the forest that surrounds them, full of inexhaustible riches that, until now, have gone unnoticed.