Tick Tock [short story]

who w[e] are

Thursday, July 18th, XXXX ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀17:42

United States of America

NXX XXXX

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I don’t write about what I do anymore. Now, I just write about ideas. So, I’m still a recorder. I record nearly everything I feel or think. But it’s more like a journal now, then some kind of agenda or planner or itinerary. What I do now can almost be considered ordinary.

But my role in society has already been cemented. I am the “Crazy One.” My head is always in the clouds, and when others are introducing me, and they think I’m not listening, they subtly slip in a, “She’s not all there, you know?”

But I’m very much here. I just see the world differently.

Usually, its artists who say that. But artists are just socially acceptable versions of us. Us? Who is us?

Us. We’re that group of people who don’t perceive the world as we are told to. No, we’re not revolutionaries. We’re not Joan of Arc. We’re not George Washington. We’re not Einstein or Steve Jobs. We’re the people that you see in art galleries, when you’re at the mall, when you’re buying bread, when you’re talking on your phone with friends, when you’re standing on the street corner waiting for your bus. 

What are we? A cult?

No. We don’t stand out at all. We don’t wear special clothes. We don’t have a far away look in our eyes. We’re the people who are waiting with you. We shiver when it gets cold, and wrap our scarves even tighter. We bob our heads to the music coming through our earbuds. We’re scrolling through our phones on the CNN app. We’re checking our stocks. We’re all around you.

We might even be in you.

Who is we?

Perhaps I should clarify. My English teacher always used to say I had a thing for dramatics and speaking in a roundabout fashion. But no one these days knows how to use language articulately. No one knows how to describe anything, and if you describe too much, it’s TMI. It’s not, “That’s interesting, go on,” anymore. It’s “Ugh, you’re taking too long to tell your story!”

But we - this we - we are artists. And we come to a full circle again. So let me put it this way: have you ever looked at something and thought, “That would look better with a spiral instead of a curlicue?” The two are very different things, I assure you. That brings up another point - if you’re like us, you won’t need to Google what the difference between a spiral and a curlicue is, unless you don’t know what the words mean, but you know what I mean when I say what I say. 

Maybe, sometimes, you’ve read a book or an article or a newspaper, and you think, “I would use the word ‘the’ with the long e sound instead of ‘a’ with the uh sound,” and you would understand that outside of a grammatical context. But it’s the feeling of you wanting to do something differently. To want to create, and share that creation with the world.

If you’re a writer, a painter, an architect, a person in the fine arts, performing arts, visual arts, communicative arts, and so on and so forth, then you understand what I’m saying.