Daily Story 41: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

There's a sort of threshold to everything in the universe, an end to the infinite; a smallest unit of size, of energy, of time. It goes against everything we can see, where the world is eternally divisible into smaller parts - but when you break it down far enough everything becomes a whole number. I was at the party when someone turned on the strobe light. Suddenly we were reduced to a series of still images, and I found myself thinking about a quantum of time. Whatever the smallest unit of time is, no matter how immeasurably tiny, it means that we are nothing more than characters in a flip-book. There is no true connection to our past or future selves, nor are we truly alive - we are still drawings in a spinning zoetrope.

What is more, we have no influence on these images. As they already exist at the smallest division of time they have no way to create their successors; cause and effect is then just an extension of this illusion. I cannot kill you, my darling, because you cannot die. You believe that this knife is being thrust into you - like so - but in fact it has always been and will always be exactly where it is. Were God but to stop turning the pages you would be frozen, unknowing, in this moment; covered in blood that has never been inside of you, arm outstretched to me though we have never spoken. Each tiny instant is a tableaux without inherent meaning.

The times that we were happy together will continue to exist the way anything does when you aren't looking at it. Our fights will remain as well, but we no longer need to assign blame; there is none to be found. We are blameless, my love. We are pure and innocent mannequins on display, arranged before the moment of creation by the hand of the almighty. When I saw you at the party, frozen in the flash of the strobe, I thought that you were kissing that man. I could not have been more wrong. That version of you, one of billions, still waits with her arm around him. She is beautiful, as beautiful as any of you. Her lips are pressed against his, and she is forever unaware that I am watching. But there was no betrayal; any agreement we thought we made was between two sculptures in another frame of this film. It has no relevance to us.

There is nothing to fear. The series of lifeless forms you think of as your body has already decayed to dust, is being born, is holding mine in the field behind your house. All of these, simultaneously, forever. Strike a pose, darling, and relax. We're all dead somewhere.