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Thank you listening to Paired Season Three! Be sure to leave a review if you enjoyed this episode!
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Credits:
Creator/Writer/Producer - Liz Anderson
Editor/Composer - MJ
Cover Art - Adrian Theuma
Theme Music - Arne Parrot
Hey. Hey….hey! Over here!
Hi! I’m so glad you made it. It’s beautiful today, right? Here, take my hand, and step on up...watch your step. There. Look at that. Isn’t it beautiful?
Where are we? Oh, I super don’t know. Best I can tell, my wires got crossed a bit. Fibers of the world getting frayed; or put back together again. Not sure. So I came here! Doctor T let me do a dream cycle or two. Things are always a little clearer after one.
You wanna walk a little? There’s this one tree I really like. C’mon.
If you remember, I started this particular story with a picture of a world like yours, with small differences. You’re going to have to bear with me, because I’ve got another story for you.
Like I’ve said, the future is not as different as we would like it to be. The checked luggage of humanity is still weighing down the plane. For example, we still teach children lessons by, you know, scaring them. With fairy tales.
One of the stories goes like this: if a child is particularly stubborn, we tell them the tale of Mother Moveless. It goes like this: There once was a young mother. She had children, a loving partner, and all the joys she could wish for. Every day she delighted in everything the world presented to her. She saw everything, and loved it all, but one day she began to fear - what was she missing? What if it all went by too fast? What if tomorrow brought sorrow? The fear she saw at the end of many tomorrows was too much to bear. So she sought the counsel of a local miracle worker, who gave her an incantation that would allow the woman to slow down time. However, the miracle worker warned the woman, “Use this sparingly - time is not kind to those who wish to stop its march.”
And for a while the woman was happy; whenever she wished to halt a moment, she would use those powerful words, and revel in the luxury of every savory detail. But despite her charm, her world continued to spin. Time slowed, but never stopped, and so her fear grew. One day, her youngest child turned five years old. How was this possible? It was only yesterday that the sweet boy was born. She couldn’t bear to think of another year of her child’s life going by with such speed, mourning the loss of a year that could never return. And so, the woman readied her words again. - This time, she cast a spell of such powerthat the room filled with warm air and the grinding of gears. Everything would halt for her; the promised tomorrow need never come...the world would only turn when she told it to.
But something went wrong...as the spell grew in force, the light through the window began to fade...sunset already? It had only been half past noon. And now it was dark...and now...it was light again. The woman saw her partner come into the kitchen, and suddenly disappear from it. The sun set again...and rose again. The days began to move swiftly through the window - plants on the windowsill that were verdant a day ago shriveled. The woman realized quickly, horrified, that while the world beyond her was moving at a regular pace, she was moving imperceptibly slow within it. To all who saw the young woman, she seemed a statue made flesh. Her family watched her take years to move to the door, months to grasp for the knob, days to blink. From inside the curse, she watched her children, now six, now ten, now fifteen, run about the kitchen, make friends, fall in love. She saw them cry blubbering tears, and knew that by the time she was able to hold a hand out in comfort those tears would be long dry. She saw her beloved partner establish a pattern of sitting next to her immobile figure every evening, telling her stories she couldn’t hear, giving her a flurry of nightly forehead kisses that felt like butterfly wings on her skin. She watched her children, now 18, now 21, now 30, leave through the back door and not return. She saw her partner pull up a chair nightly, moving slower each time, until one night, the chair stayed at the counter, and never moved again. She saw the windows crack. She saw the wallpaper peel. She saw a mighty storm put a hole in the ceiling. She saw the concrete crack. She saw the weeds overtake the footprint. She saw everything. Some say even now she watches, reaching for a doorknob that is no longer there, desperately trying to catch up to the world that left her behind.
Wicked stuff, eh? That’ll convince any toddler to start potty training.
It’s a newer story, so there are lots of theories as to what the moral is supposed to be? Is it about accepting fate, is it about not being selfish - one popular conspiracy is that the technocrats made it up to convince people that slowing down building their cool new surveillance drones with complaints about “privacy” or “not getting paid” made YOU the evil guy, if you think about it.
Me? I think it’s about people’s desire to delay the inevitable. They do it not because they want to savor the moment, or because there is more work to do, but because deep down, they fear that the end will be...unspectacular.
I’m being unnecessarily cryptic! But that’s ok. I’ll say its ART, and if you’re confused, well, you just don’t understand the art.
Oh good! We’re here. There’s that tree….it’s a GOOD one.
Ok, look over there. There’s a little square building down a bit. Big floor to ceiling windows, about three stories. Close to us is a wing that’s obviously newer than the rest of the building. They put a lot of effort into the garden outside so all the folks in there have something nice to look at. All lovely and weirdly...boring. In a nice way.
I circle around this place a lot. Each time the lines are a little bit clearer. I can see the tint of the windows, the weeds growing in the cracks of the concrete. Before it smelled like warm plastic. Now I can smell grass, antiseptic, floor cleaner, and air. There is a window on the second floor, third from the left. See it? I want to look in it. I’m going to look in it.
But not right now. ‘Cause I got this tree!
I’m going to pretend everything is normal for a little bit. I hope you do too. And don’t worry, if you don’t want to look through the window with me you don’t need to. But I’m going to have to. Soon.
I’m gonna wake up. I hope you’ll meet me back here when I go to sleep again. Will you?
Ok. I’ll walk you back.