Timeless
🗓️ June 1, 2020 📖 2 min read
Unfinished, a little incomprehensible to me. 15 minute prompt on creating a set-up to a dystopian future. Maybe there’s somewhere I can take this.
Shattered alarm clock. The glass is cracked with perfect precision, near-identical triangles with jaggedy points and an edge that feels like it would cut through my soul.
I’m hurt. Not because of the glass and the blood trickling down my palms. The true pain coursing through my veins is not warm or sanguine. It’s the pain of knowing that nothing is real. Nothing can be trusted.
When I broke that clock, I shattered time. Time was the only thing that was real. The illusion was broken. What I relied on for certainty, for order. For better or for worse, we aged and time gave us the grace and horrors that came along with it. Time was what kept the markets up, cash churning, breads-a-baking, paint-a-drying. I can think back to all the moments when Sasha would show up “exactly ten minutes late”, with a devious glint in her eye. She was never on time. I was happy to wait for her. I’d wait a hundred days for her, but a hundred days means nothing with no time.
Appearances crumbled down to nothing at all, yet we are now ageless. Isn’t this what we always wanted? But now we want what we can’t have. There was nothing to uphold; no reason to. Time created meaning - an abrupt end to something you recognize as quite fleeting, ephemeral. So you grip it with your two hands, sloppily but with vigour.
Immortality is the worst curse when the world doesn’t age with you.