Out Of Time

What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.
—Ray Bradbury

Days were gloomy, greyish, and her spirit always felt the same, what was left of it. A spirit that had run dry, that could not light up anything anymore. Everything she saw and experienced was through the interface of an LCD screen, a window to the outside, the existence of which she was unsure of. Her knowledge of the biggest problems in the world was derived from the blog wars she occasionally browsed through. A picture of a man shot down dead, a malnutrition-ed child who was only a black canvas stretched over bones. Work was indexing and terminals. Learning was you-tube tutorials. Honest communication was pixel strings of text messages sent describing the frivolous. Memories were pictures on Instagram, some GB of data on her cloud account. She was an expert at recognizing 'emoticons', but clueless when it came to the expressions on a three dimensional human face that could be touched. The only warmth she had ever felt was the heat from over used processors. Her hollow thoughts were like an abandoned dog that looked for food in the trash and could not find a smell or a track to follow. A child lost among the crowd on the night of the public fair. A sailing ship that was without wreck and without guide. She was first a little girl, robbed of her innocence, then an old lady, with matted eyes that kept inching closer to the screen, year after year, day after day. She took out her soul a long time ago and carefully zipped into an unseen folder for safe keeping. Her life was digital – a careful combination of zeros and ones, of eyes shut, and eyes open that let her optimize the output she was required to give. Time was a dimension-less quantity – a number on the screen.