"It's so beautiful."
It is. As perfectly strange as the metropolis may be, possessed of a certain bizarre charm, there is nothing that can match this. The ocean is a million shades of blue, delicate azure, deep cobalt, soft turquoise. The horizon runs into the sky, a wall of calm scratched by occasional whispers of pure white. Mountains run, jagged and thick with suggestion, slumbering giants and dormant beasts. They jut arrogantly from their foundations, powdered with lush plant life, scrub and branches bent ninety-degrees by the breeze. The sand is crunchy underfoot, creamy and warm, blasted by the sun and kneaded by the surf.
It's as pretty as a postcard, the kind of scene one desires to capture greedily, to snatch with a lens and stow away for days less magnetic. So, that's what we do now. Where once we would soak it up with our soul, now we snap it up, all of this, the world around us, and become soaked in a sea of bytes and binary code.
I see people swapping the glory around us now for one they imagine can be relived later. We want to replay the present, live in the past, experience our memories in high-definition. We lose sight of the magic in our minds. Sure, my memories don't run at 4 gigahertz, and I can't upload my fuzzy memories onto Youtube. Then again, squinting at my 2-inch screen, somehow the magic I thought I had experienced is less real...
