To Remember: Just One Night (Hoodie x Reader)

Broken Clock

(((((WARNING: Do not read if you have superbly religious beliefs in the afterlife or have a tendency for suicidal thoughts! Other then that, I have been working on this since before I started the Masky x Reader series. I wanted it to be perfect. If you find an error in spelling or wording anywhere, let me know. I'll fix it.)))))

I'm a Junior in my local high school, and my homeroom teacher is the Culinary Arts teacher. So I've had the Culinary Arts teacher as my homeroom teacher since the first day of school. Perks of being in her class?

Well free snacks, obviously.

Anyways. After being in her class nearly every day for the last three years, I've recently noticed the analog clocks in her room were still not ticking. You know the clocks, those annoying ones that tick-tock as the seconds go by. There are six seperate kitchen sections in the room, an analog clock in each, but for the full three years I have gone to this school none of them have ever worked.

I brought up the issue to my teacher, but she simply shrugged it off. "We have digital clocks," she explained, "We don't need analog clocks anymore." I wasn't satisfied with that excuse, but I let it go. Then a thought hit me. All that clock knows is that last tick before its battery stopped working.

I told my friend this, and she stared at me like I was insane. Not denying my insanity, but still. Then, as we stood in our group's kitchen one day, I asked her a question that ended up changing her life after I explained it. I asked her, "What if you could go back in time to the moment that clock stopped?"

The question may not seem like much, but bear with me. It came to me that all the clock knew, until the moment someone put new batteries in, was that moment when it died. Stuck in its moment, stuck within its last tick. When the battery finally died, the clock was stuck in that point in time.

Then I started thinking about time, and everything you could do with it. Spend it, waste it, give it, so many options. That time was made up of moments, each moment a memory in someone's heart somewhere in the world, each moment a tick on a clock, a clock that counts each passing moment.

We as humans do many things with our time. With our moments. With our ticks. We spend time doing the things we love, making moments that will forever last. We give our moments to others, focusing on them and helping them create moments they will cherish.

But you can also take time. Steal away the moments that others deserved to have for your own selfish ticks. You waste time on dead-end opportunities that eat away at your moments with savage teeth, gnawing at your souls in a brutal attempt to tear away your beloved opportunities to make good memories.

Any wasted time truely is just wasted. Every tick, every moment, every second in time could be your last. You could make your own time end. But what happens to the moments you would have lived? Both the good and the bad? They have to go somewhere, moments don't just disappear.

They stay with you. Like a clock. When a clock stops working, do the seconds it would have ticked go away? Do the markings, the gears, the counting hands fall in defeat? No. The seconds still go on, and every part of that clock stays with it until fate decides otherwise.

We are human, but we depend on clocks to keep track of our time. It is part of human nature to be absorbed into what time it is. They loose themselves amongst their memories.

So, where do your unlived moments go when you die too early? They stay with you, whithering away in agony with no lulling promises of deathly freedom. Moments never die.

A broken clock can get new batteries. A human can not. Once we die, that is it. Nothing comes next. That last moment, whether in terror, joy, or peace will be all that we know. There is no restart, there are no new batteries to keep us going.

And although we live the moments that ticking clock brings, our moments live inside of us. We cherish each passing second, not knowing if it would would be our last second.

Our last moment before our gears stopped working.

Our last tick.

~Jinx IllusionTheProxy