Have Faith, Iris.

Have Faith, Iris

When you reach eighteen years of age you receive an injection with a formula designed to eliminate your ability to feel love in any form for the rest of your life. You’re forced to forget how you feel about your loved ones and people you hold close to your heart. The way I view it is your heart becomes this frozen object inside of you, dormant and broken. It still fuels your life and continues to pump blood throughout your veins, but it becomes broken in a different way, it’s unable to love. The formula in the injection is created to stop signals that are sent to the brain that regard love or feelings of adornment, resulting in the complete absence of the emotion all together. This was all explained to me by my father when I was little. He’s on The Council for the city; they’re sort of like our government. They carry out the laws that our founders based our society off of. The major law, and the one that is the most stressed, is the law against love.

To our founders and to The Council, love is a major distraction to what is important in life. Our society is all centered on one thing: succeeding. We’re born and raised to be prodigies, expected to do nothing less than perfection. We’re expected to complete all of our phases of education at an exemplarily level, graduating into the world ready to execute the job in our desired field perfectly. The jobs in the city are strictly to enhance education and the laws, no jobs connected with a passion are an option. Anything that prevents this sequence from flowing must be terminated. According to our law, love clouds one’s vision and alters what they see as their main priority, which strays from our societies beliefs. The injection was created by our founders to stop love form interfering with their perfect idea of life. My father told me the reason why we aren’t injected at birth is so that we remember who our family is, remember that they mean something to us even if we don’t feel anything for them. Even though we aren’t allowed to feel love for our family, we still are allowed to realize that they are special to us.  

Before our eighteenth year, laws are set into place to prevent love in the form of a partner from entering into our life. It’s simple really; we aren’t allowed to fall in love. We take classes from the moment we start school on how not to be attracted to the opposite sex. However, these courses are not designed to eradicate reproduction. Therefore, sex is advertised to just be sex, no passion or feelings attached. We also must take courses that explain why love is fatal in our society, and why it is ultimately banished from it. This is all designed to turn us away from love, to not even consider it. Our schooling is supposed to get us in the habit of being perfect, to execute everything in our life to the best of our ability with no distractions yet again.

What our society doesn’t understand is what we really want.

To be free.

To be free to make our own decisions and live the life we desire to live, because the truth is, not all of us want to be perfect. The Council may try and force their theory of this perfect society down our throats, but that doesn’t mean we have to take it, or agree with it. Because in secret, not all of us do agree with the law. I am one of these people.

When I was sixteen, I fell in love in a way words can’t explain. It happened like a wave crashing onto the shore, quick and immediately on impact. Ander and I have always shared this unique bond, I guess it can be compared to the way I love my family, but, not exactly. This was the kind of love my society feared and wants to keep us guarded from. Despite all of the lessons I take that are supposed to push me away from love and the law that states it’s wrong and forbidden, all it did was push me towards love. Towards Ander.

Tomorrow, I am scheduled to have the injection to take away the love that is present in my life, even the love that no one knows about, my love for Ander. I’ll remember who he is of course, just like I’ll remember my family. I just won’t remember the love I have for him that burns deep within me in my heart. We haven’t told anyone how Ander and I feel about each other, because that would lead to banishment from the city. No one knows what’s beyond our cities walls, and no one whose been banished has ever been allowed to come back and tell the tale.