Sounds pretty dumb, eh? Well, I had a week to write a 3-page story for English about anthropomorphism, so I threw this together at the last moment. I’m sharing it because I like how I just started writing the thing, and ended up with a moral that mostly makes sense. Also, it sort of retells my stories from Europe. Have a read.
I was put on display on November 20 at exactly 7:34 AM. I was a new model, so I was placed at the window of my store. I could look up at the giant building across from me, where people entered, spent about 10 hours of their day inside, and exited. I watched them enter and exit along with the sun for 32 days, 3 hours, and 16 minutes.
On December 22, 10:50 AM, a man rushed into the store, yanked me out of the display case, slammed me onto the counter, paid for me, and ran out the door, stuffing me into his pocket. This man, a 38-year- and 2-month-old man, had promised his son the Illuminator RX600 watch with a digital hour- and minute-hand display and a separate date window. I am that watch.
He threw me into a box and tossed me under the Christmas tree before anyone could see him do it – he was a bit late in his Christmas shopping. On December 25, 6:54 AM, I heard someone stomping down the stairs. 7 seconds later, my container was lifted high into the air, and I heard its exterior being ripped to shreds. Light filled my container, and as my liquid crystal adjusted to the light, I saw the face of a 10-year- and 2-month old boy gazing at me in wonder. He reached in and swung me around by my wristband.
He burst outside into the snow and spent 58 minutes running from friend’s house to friend’s house obsessing over me. After he was content that the whole neighborhood had heard about me, he took me off complaining that the wristband buckle irritated him, and tossed me onto his night table. I slid across the table, smacked myself against the wall, fell into the gap between the two, and found myself in the corner of the room under the table. I thought that this boy who I knew just loved me would come back in a few minutes and retrieve me.
2 years, 7 months, and 8 days later, the 40-year- and 9-month-old man who bought me reached a hand under my night table and found me. He smirked at me, realizing that his boy had not worn me ever since a short time after he opened my box, held me in front of a fellow clock to see if I had the right time, and set me forward an hour – daylight savings time, of course.
The man looked me over more carefully. He noticed the four – count’em, four – buttons on my side, as well as my backlight and versatile stopwatch mode. He looked down at the analog watch on his wrist, and then back at me. Sighing, he undid his watch and put me in its place. I finally had an owner.
This man, I found out, was an airplane pilot. He usually made international flights, to places like Paris and Italy, so he changed my time display almost every day – so much that even I lost track of the time. At least he paid attention to me and made sure that I was accurate to the millisecond. I had a great time in my travels, living a life as a watch, careless of how much time passed by.
The man spent time off in popular places, and I was given time to see the sights. There was the time when my owner clumsily adjusted me while leaning over the side of the Eiffel Tower. I remember looking up into the night sky in London and seeing a giant face, boasting extravagant hour- and minute-hands against a decorative roman numeral display – that was Big Ben. Italy, though, was the place where it all ended.
My owner had taken his family on a trip to Venice. It sort of tickled to have pigeons land on me in the grand San Marcos Square, and I felt honored to serve as the flashlight as we made our ways through narrow, rustic alleyways. I was dipped more than once in the tomato sauce of the exquisite food that my owner dined on, and I even got a taste of the original Italian gelato. But on a gondola ride, I felt my buckle coming loose from my worn-down plastic wristband, and – plop! I fell off the side and into the canal, and as I sank to the bottom I saw my owner looking back at me, fruitlessly attempting to retrieve me.
This was my second time that I was lost and forgotten, but I was able again to do what I was made to do – to count the time. 15 years, 4 months, 16 days, 8 hours, 28 minutes, and 22 seconds had passed when my batteries finally died out. I cannot say whether it was an eternity or just a few more months until I was found again – all I can say is that I spent the best days of my life without a care in the world – not even my own reason for being got in my way. I think that everyone and everything should have a chance to experience those kinds of moments.
I guess I can give this sort of an epilogue that ties in to real life. I think that the reason that I chose a watch for my anthropomorphic object was because I wore a watch for about a year that I had I found in about 3-foot-deep water in Lerici, Italy, a small city off Italy’s west coast. Just like in the story, it glowed and stopped working, but mine stopped working in less than a year. Oh well.