In January 2020, the cityscape of New York is saturated in a cold, melancholy hue. Rain falling relentlessly from storm clouds, the fruits of a superstorm brewing hundreds of miles away in the Atlantic. It's a sight that etches itself dominantly into memory, but the rain infiltrates the senses in its unique manner. For the first time, I can physically perceive climate change. It tastes like salt and decay, like the city is weeping. I feel it soaking through my clothes, chilling me to the bone with every gust of wind. I feel it again when I am shuddering in my soaked coat, huddled in a cramped subway car on my way home.

Throughout the winter, I am haunted by an image of a drowning rat, a symbol often seen scrawled on partially submerged walls as street art. The rat looks up into the sky, rain pouring down on it ceaselessly, as the city around it floods. It has accepted its fate, sips from the puddles around it, becoming part of the deluge. Its eyes seem to be pleading for mercy.

Two years on, I find myself reclining on a sandy dune at the far end of the Earth, a few kilometers west of Africa's Skeleton Coast in Namibia. I can hear the distant rustling of the Sahara's sand grains and the occasional hissing sound they make as they're lifted and carried by the wind. The faint scent of desert shrubs occasionally pronounces itself before being whisked away by the wind. Such barrenness, I'd prefer over the city's decay at any moment.

The rustling of sand eventually gives way to a monotonous, slow droning — the sound of the desert stretching endlessly. From the top of my dune, just a few hundred meters away from the beginning of this desert, I can hear the land slowly being eaten away by the sand. I'm later told by a local inhabitant, that this is the norm during the Saharan summer. Sit and experience long enough, and you'll see how dunes grow over strips of vegetation, covering what once was a vibrant savanna under layers of sand. This isn't merely the desert you are seeing and hearing.