The Pillar

The pillar supported her weight perfectly, come rain or sunshine. She leant on it, and it never failed to support her, and she was glad it was there. She might have fallen, she thought, but for the pillar. The storms weathered it, but it held, ground down, but ever strong. It wouldn't let her fall.

As time passed she began to feel strong again, and finally one day she stood up straight, of her own accord. And the pillar fell down, collapsed, and it broke into tiny pieces at her feet.

"Oh," she said, because the pillar had been leaning on her too all along.

This Game

Our eyes meet, the game is between us. We're both assessing. Assessing each other, and assessing our moves. The pieces are strewn across the board, but they're not haphazard. They've been worked to this position over a long period of time.

Her gaze bores into me with a soft intensity, and for a moment I feel I might be lost in their dark allure. But my mind is on the game, and I know that my own eyes are causing her just as much distraction. I smile, and I can't help but wonder if by now she knows I smile because I've got my next move. I shift a piece forward. A smooth, subtle but deftly quick response, and she moves her own. She knew my move before I made it, and played me in. She's done this to me before, and for a moment back there I even thought I'd lost. But the game's still going on, even now, we're still playing. Playing against each other. Playing with each other.

She laughs, just briefly, and for a moment its captivating. In that instant, nothing else is real but her pleasure. We both know the dangers of every move we play, but it keeps us happy. That's what games are all about, and seeing her satisfaction just urges me to continue. I know I could lose at any minute. She showed me that all too well. But that look on her face says 'if you don't quit, I won't either.' She makes me feel like this is anybody's game, it's a dangerous game we play, but the more we play, the more I'm convinced the prize will be worth it. So I make another move.

She ponders the next one for longer. I can read her well by now, but in this silence, in this comfortable awkwardness, she continues to surprise me. So I don't let me guard down. She knows she can break me, at any time. She knows. But she won't, and I have to trust that. I need it. In my mind's eye, I watch her lean across the board, and I know she's teasing me. It's something about the way she moves, the way she looks as she moves, something that entices me like a sweet bait. She makes her move.

This time she gives nothing away. Those deep brown eyes hide her thoughts, a mischievous innocence, her lips don't even twitch. There's cunning behind that innocence. I worry, if just for a second. Has she ended the game? I check the pieces. No. She could have, though, I'm sure of it. I consider our last few moves. In my head is everything she's ever done. She nearly ended this game once before, but she restarted it. She could have beaten me then, and she could have beaten me now. What is she waiting for? Now it is her that smiles, and I have a dawning realisation, and a part of me melts at her voice.

"Your move."

I'm sorry

You changed your world, you changed yourself, you patterned yourself after me.

I'm sorry, I don't want to look in the mirror anymore.

I told you I wanted to look up at the stars, you thought it was cute.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean with you.

Imagine a world...

Imagine a world, Talon permitted me, imagine a world of absolute apathy. Imagine a world where the people think not for themselves, but as a collective. They think as they are permit, about what they are told to, and only about those things. These people are happy, they are content, and they want for nothing of true value. Their desires are prescribed, and in this way their goals are eventually attainable, and they know this, and this soothes them. In this world, there is no creativity, no unorthodoxy, nothing abstract and no-one unusual. Such things are heretical, and there is no deviance from this monotonous bliss.

Rebellion is a lost word, long forgotten. For who would wish to rebel against the simple life, Talon asks. Nobody has time for such disturbances in their lives in this world. Such a distraction would only cost time that could be better spent on their personal objectives. Objectives that cause no change to the lives of others, or in truth to their own, but are everything to these plugged-in drones. These people do not crash into one another, do not meet, do not convene. They interact through a method of impersonal social networking, making contact but never emotionally bonding. This method is simpler, more time efficient and less committal. It is everything to them, and they follow one another through persistent updates, never touching but never out of touch.

The leaders in this world strive only to keep things the same. Nobody ever meets them, but they influence entire nations, creating minor points of interest that only register as blips on a spreadsheet of meaningless data fed to the people through a virtual drip. True events of real importance are never exposed, though when they were, the people here would glance over them with the same indifference as they do the glut of other information at their disposal. The knowledge of centuries is at the fingertips of these people, but they do not even spare it a moment of their time, for its accessibility makes it axiomatic, its volume overwhelming, and its content irrelevant to the lives of these singular beings.

Somebody would rise up against this, I reason. But what is one individual inspiration, Talon counters, when millions are lethargic. An army is not raised from a mass of peoples indifferent to their own surroundings. A call to arms bears no meaning on a populace concerned only with its own daily grind. There is no problem as they are told there is no problem, and they are told there is no war to be had. They wake and they sleep, they do not question why. One voice is drowned by many others.

We can only be glad no such world exists in this way, I surmise.

Talon says nothing.