Final Scarcity

My old memories will be of little use to you in your search for water.
Even now, after all these years, it's still hard for me to fathom how far
we have fallen in my life. Water was so plentiful as to be absurd. You
could open a faucet in your home and it would pour right out, as if that
is how things had always been in human history. We would buy plastic
bottles filled with water, we'd fill portable containers with it, we would
bathe in it any time we felt the urge to be clean. It was always there
until it wasn't. Everything fell into chaos once supplies became scarce.
There was so much suffering and death. To die of thirst is the most
excruciating sort of death. Men, women, children, all condemned to die
due to lack of a basic need. The rich and powerful gloated for some
time until their stores began to run dry. In the end, their wealth and
power were nothing without water. It was then that what little remained
of civilization collapsed. Now, water is life. Water is more valuable
than diamonds, gold, or oil, ever were. This world is bathed in thirst.
Some say our world is dying. I say that it is not. We are dying. The
world will be fine once it has rid itself of us. Perhaps that has been the
plan all along. Soon there will be none like me left who remember
the old world and the hubris of our decadence. Only those born in this
time of endless thirst will remain, and the old world will be reduced
to stories and fairy tales that will scarcely be believed. What ever did
we do to deserve such a fleeting paradise? Even my memory has begun
to fail me. I wonder at times how much of the past was ever real.
All of it, I think. Then doubt is cast. We could never have been so
foolish. Yet, foolishness is always in overabundance. I grow tired.
I want to close these old eyes and dream of water flowing over my
body without any thought of it ever eliding into scarcity.