Today’s words are pulsating (PULSIEREN) and powder (PULVER). Predictably, we went with beating hearts and things that go boom in the night.
There was a time when people used to have human bodies, but that was a long time ago. There is a phrase, “evolve or die”, and people chose to evolve, replacing bits and pieces of their bodies with clockwork.
When children are ready to stop being children, their hearts are replaced. With a heart that doesn’t beat. With a heart that has to be wound up, as if it were a clock. One that will give them more time. And their old heart is crushed. It’s made into powder. So that fireworks can burst in the sky. Revealing what those children had in their hearts. Because the price of evolution is remembering that which has been willingly sacrificed.
Who needs a heart? I don’t, I’m not a child anymore. The only thing that matters is living forever. I won’t allow grief or disappointment to wear me away. Until there is nothing but a childhood memory left. One of happier times. When my heart still beat to the rhythm of my dreams, and those dreams hadn’t hurt me yet. I will live forever. I will forget my heart. I will forget my childhood. And no day of mine will be allowed to be happier than the next.
I was used to my heartbeat. It wasn’t a birdsong trapped inside a cage, it wasn’t the song of the sea coming from a spiral shell, but it was mine, and there was reassurance in that. I could breathe, I could sleep, knowing that I had something that was mine and only mine. I don’t know if clockwork will be able to give me that. I’ve touched it before, and it’s cold. Too cold to give me comfort. Too cold to feel like it’s mine. And I know that I am a child, but I don’t think that I am ready to belong to someone else.
Don’t be silly. If you love someone, you don’t let them go. You find the way to make them live forever. I know that because someone loves me. Look. They have already taken my heart. Do you see the hole in my chest? Isn’t it big? Soon they will put clockwork inside me. In that place meant to store all my memories. And I will always remember that I was loved. That someone loved me enough to buy me more time.
There was something red. I thought that it was blood, but they told me not to worry. Someone picked something that looked like a strawberry and took it out of my chest. There was more of that red thing. But then everything went dark. And they told me not to worry. That soon they would give me, not one, but a thousand suns. That strawberry was a childish flavor, and soon I would see the light.
My fireworks, the thing that filled me with a sense of wonder and made my childhood bearable was the sea. Not the waves, not those broken shards at someone else’s mercy. I used to dream about the sea’s depths. About all those wonderful things that no one had discovered, that no one had ruined, not yet. But I am not a child anymore. I can finally move on. Who knows, maybe someday I will be the one in a position to grant mercy, if I feel like it.
They put clockwork in my chest. They made me watch, as they pulverized my heart. As they lit the fuse, and fireworks burst in the night. I didn’t burst into tears, but it was a close thing. When I was a child, I believed in friendship. In the beautiful friendships written in books. But enough time had ticked away, and the clockwork in my chest proclaimed that I wasn’t a child anymore. The time had come, to make real friends or choose to be forever alone.
I’ve had dreams before. Things that I have forgotten as soon as I have woken up. Yesterday I was a child, with a heart inside my chest. Today I am something else, whatever this clockwork says that I am. What’s the point of making me watch those fireworks? What I used to keep in my heart doesn’t matter. I will forget it soon enough, regardless of how important or wonderful it felt at the time.
Children need to feel special, we need to feel irreplaceable. That’s why everything is a competition. We know that once there is clockwork inside our chests, we will all be alike. That we will all become spare parts. These firework displays are all we really have. To show who we are. That we aren’t like everyone else. If you wanted true love, you shouldn’t have turned our hearts into a public display. You should have known that we would try to outdo everyone else. That we would lie, that we would show off. That we would fill our hearts to the brim, just to have more fireworks, brighter and more colorful fireworks, than anyone else.
Evolve or die. There isn’t really a choice, is there? Not unless you wouldn’t mind dying alone, in a sunless place.
Gears look just like miniature suns. Each one adds extra time to our lives. A day. A year. A decade. A century. There is a formula, and I am sure that the numbers make sense. But that doesn’t change the fact that most days I feel like a dog. Living in someone else’s world. Living a life that was meant for someone else.
I had a name once. Someone else chose it for me. But it was mine. Someone else chose this for me too. Not the parts that I wear now, but the first step I took down the path that has brought me here. I didn’t choose to have my heart removed from my chest, I only watched the fireworks with everyone else. I was a child. What was I supposed to do? By the time I looked back down, and I added 2 and 2, there was no going back. There was only the path in front of me. Every step forward meant adding something new. And losing a little bit more, of that name, that used to feel like something that was truly mine.
This smile? I had it custom made. I’ve already lived more than a thousand lives. How else was I supposed to hold on to my smile?