Your Legacy

You’re the greatest designer the universe has ever known. You were born in a vacuum and self-engendered all of your skills before your senses were even alive. You emerged from the womb with a personal vision unlike anyone else’s. You take nothing, only give. Your design is an eternal gift to the cosmos.

In the first decade of your life, you invented a new shape. It was a shape no one had ever seen or even imagined could exist. Along with it you gave us eight new colors, one for each day of the week, which you said was not the perfect week and therefore actually has eight days, not seven. We didn’t know. You gave us that new day — Ur-day — and declared that it should be devoted to simple thoughts about elegant things.

In the second decade that we were graced with your existence, you taught us that clock faces should be viewed from the back, and should always be transparent. You said that trains were a mistake the world was now stuck with. You lamented the embarrassing similarities of form and coloring between facial features and genitalia. There were things you could change, and you did, and there were things no one could change, and you tried valiantly.

Now you realize everything is wrong. Your art is inventing everything that never existed, a career that creates a new world nothing like the one we live in. Nothing is borrowed or reused. No one is credited or even important. Not a single idea goes into it that did not come directly from you. Every one of your ideas is entirely novel. But you can’t escape the interference of the world in your efforts. It attacks you with its irrelevance. You have to resist it every single second.

And then one day, you are accused of theft. You are forced to admit that something is right. But you don’t.

You don’t.