wb :

"leaaaavin' aawwn a jet plaaane, don't know wheeeen ahh'll be baaack again..."

Fritz muttered as he pressed "next" on his music player.

That old song had been in the player's hard disk for seven years now. It had been one of those which came pre-loaded on the Sony Walkman, those you couldn't delete or copy to your computer. Everytime he selected "Random Play All", it would inevitably hit that song sooner or later.

It had been a song from his parent's generation; and even the other pre-loaded songs had become classics over the span of a decade. Rock, punk, metal, emo, all went out of vogue at some point. The classics of yesteryear lay mostly forgotten in museums and private collections, enjoyed by an outdated minority.

The next song filled his ears as the old player strained to bring to memory what lines of code governed its behaviour.

The more I fill it, the slower it becomes, he mused.

The player had been a gift from his parents, on his 18th birthday when he had finally come of age. A parting gift, something to remind him of the reason he existed in the first place. A memory of his nurturers, his caretakers, something to keep with him once he broke every other tie with them.

In his century, children were considered independent of their parents once they reached 18 years of age. Conversely, parents were not obliged to take care of them after that age. In that century, one usually saw the child break every bond and strike it out on his own; a few stayed for another year or so, and even fewer took care of their parents for the rest of their lives. Keepsakes like the venerable player were not uncommon.

"to be more like me and be less like you..."

His ears caught those lines, words his parents had listened to a whole generation before him. He looked at the scuffed black player, the sweet irony glistening on the thought like sweat on a lawyer whose conscience hounded his dreams.

He shrugged. The world had no place for such thoughts.

He changed the song again, the song of the Volga Boatmen. Something old and eternal, something to stay with him as he went back to work on that temperate afternoon in the gray city under a dying sun.

Labels: prose