Chasing Time

Based on IU's 'You and I'. Copyright of Loen Entertainment.

Can also be found on booksie.com under the title 'The Forever Clock'.

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She met him on Christmas Eve in the year two thousand, at four p.m. sharp. He walked into her quaint little gift shop on the corner of high street, dressed in a sharp-looking brown jacket fitted over a snug woolen jumper, come to pick up a small trinket ordered the week before. As their eyes met, she thought she saw a flicker of recognition appear in those deep brown eyes of his, but it had been a long, dreary day and she had better things to think about then the fleeting expression of a stranger. She calmly handed him the small grey paper bag containing his purchase, a routine she was now entirely bored with, and with a quick ‘thank you’ and a bob of his head, he was on his way out the door almost as quickly as he had entered. He could have been just any other customer, after all, hundreds of them had entered and left the shop ever since it was opened, but he was not. As he opened the door to leave, he stopped.

The Boy’s Story

He was a clock maker’s apprentice in the year nineteen ninety. Together with his mentor, an old man of eighty and hair as white as snow, he lived in the clock tower on the hill, which overlooked the entire village below. According to his elderly mentor, the clock tower had been around for hundreds of years, even before the village was founded. No one knew when it was built and for what reason, but ever since people could remember, the clock told the time. It told the time hundreds of years ago, and it told the time still. It never needed work, never missed a second and never stopped. The villagers called it the ‘forever clock’.

He was an orphan boy of only ten when he was taken in from the harsh winter cold of Christmas Eve by his mentor, the last living descendent of a line of prodigious clock makers in the region. Since then, he had toiled tirelessly within the confines of the clock tower, learning everything he could about the art of clockwork from the man he affectionately called ‘Father Christmas’. Despite his humble beginnings, he was an extremely talented boy and under the expert tutelage of Father Christmas, he had just about learnt all the tricks of the trade by the time he was eighteen in nineteen ninety. He loved his trade, he loved his mentor and most of all, he loved the clock tower. There was something about the forever clock that could not easily be explained by the human intellect. The way its cogs rotated endlessly year after year inspired him in ways that he could not begin to understand. Then there was her.

He met her on the very Christmas Eve he first stepped foot in the clock tower. Her pictures hung on the walls of his master’s work room, grey and faded with time. There she was at age one, sitting calmly on the lap of an old man who vaguely resembled Father Christmas in more ways than one. She was there at age four, with a toothy grin of childhood innocence as she crawled around on the floors of the clock tower. And then again at age ten, a grown-up little girl with her birthday hat on and her cake sat smugly in front of her. But then the pictures inexplicably stopped. There was nothing strange about the pictures themselves, but the strange part of the matter was that the girl in the pictures continued to appear unexplainably in the boy’s consciousness. It was as if she was slowly taking root in his mind. Over the next few years, she constantly appeared in his dreams, always silently watching with a soft, somewhat longing expression in her doe-like eyes. And then he awoke, and she was gone. Sometimes he thought he spied her out of the corner of his eye while he was working, but he would swivel around and there would only be empty air. After a while, he got used to the dreams and simply waved it off as the pictures having imprinted themselves on a part of his sub-consciousness. What he could never explain was why the girl in his dreams always looked a little older than the most recent picture hanging on the walls. It took him a good two years before he finally plucked up the courage to ask Father Christmas about the girl in the pictures, and it was with great reluctance that the old man re-visited those painful memories of his long forgotten past.

As it turned out, the little girl in the pictures was Father Christmas’s little sister. The gift of clock making ran in the family, and she had been an extremely gifted child, far more gifted in fact, than her older brother. However, unlike Father Christmas who always had his feet firmly planted on the ground, she was forever living in the clouds, in a world of fantasy and make-believe. From a young age she often embarked on impossible projects of clockwork engineering that had completely baffled their parents. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not. As she grew older, she became even more and more withdrawn and introverted, spending much of her days holed up in her own little work room within the tower and refusing to go to school or play with other children. Their parents indulged her willfulness because she was the family’s precious little jewel, so young, so beautiful, so talented. One day in her thirteenth year, she began speaking of a boy she saw in the clock tower. He was usually asleep, she said, but at times he would be bent over at her work desk toiling over unusual clock designs that fascinated her so. He was a real oddity, she said, for he seemed to be aging so much faster than a normal person; one day he looked only about her age, the next he seemed to have grown two years overnight. He could not see her and would never know her name, she said, and it broke her heart to know that. No one in the family ever saw this mysterious young man and eventually they wrote it off as one of her imaginary flights of fancies. They thought she would get over it one day, just like she got over all her other fairy tales and impossible projects. But she did not. And on the Christmas Eve on her fourteenth year, she disappeared without a trace.

The story of the girl in the pictures struck a chord in the boy’s heart that he never knew existed. Somehow he felt as though he understood how she had felt at that time, and something inside him told him that she was telling the truth all along. He knew deep down that there was something about the forever clock and the tower he called home, something magical, something unexplainable, something impossible. He began to look forward to the times he saw her in his dreams, and to the times he could not see her yet could still feel her presence around him. She became a motivating force in his life, giving him the strength and inspiration to pursue more and more challenging clockwork projects, ones that amazed even his esteemed mentor. He could no longer live without her. And then on Christmas Eve of his eighteenth year, she disappeared as she had done sixty years ago. Without a trace.

The Girl’s Story

She was a clock maker’s daughter in the year nineteen thirty. Together with her father, mother and older brother, she lived in the clock tower on the hill, which overlooked the entire village below. That year she turned thirteen, and she was more beautiful than she had ever been. She had always been a quirky girl, unlike the other little girls in the village, and her family loved her for her uniqueness. She was their little princess, the beautiful and talented one; she was their pride and joy. Despite all the love that she was surrounded with, the clock maker’s daughter was never satisfied with the reality she lived in. Her imagination would not allow it. Instead of playing with dolls and partaking in games of hide-and-seek like all ordinary little girls did, she preferred to bask in her solitude within the confines of her little work room in the clock tower. There she could live in her world of fantasies, formulating idea after impossible idea, crafting impeccable works of art that should have been far beyond the abilities of a young girl. She was glad that her parents always left her to her own devices and never forced her to dispose of her uniqueness in order to fit in with the crowd, but after project upon impossible project, she eventually became tired and weary. There was something missing in her life, something that should have been there but somehow was not. Despite days and nights of constant pondering, she never could quite place her finger on what that missing jigsaw piece was. Then there was him.

He appeared one Christmas Eve like a lightning bolt out of the blue. He was a boy of perhaps eleven or twelve, possibly about the same age she was. She found him fast asleep on her bed, where previously there had only been empty air. The first time she saw him there were tear stains lining his cheeks, and a sense of sorrow that pierced from his heart right through to hers. She tried to wake him but he would never wake, and when she turned her back he would be gone, as though he was never there. He appeared day after day and she watched him night after night, never taking her eyes off him even though he was only ever there for a few fleeting moments. Then there were those rare moments when she caught him awake, seated at her work bench working on some odd-looking timepiece unlike anything she had ever seen before. They were relatively simple to begin with, but as time went by his projects seemed to increase in complexity and detail. Even though she only ever got a quick glimpse of what he was working on, they fascinated her. It was as though he belonged to a different world and a different time. There was something else strange about the boy that puzzled her greatly. He looked only about her age when she first saw him, yet as the days went by, he seemed to age faster than any normal person she had ever seen. By the time three months went by, the boy had grown a whole two or three years. She had no doubts that it was always the same person she saw, yet she had no way of explaining why he was growing up so fast, while she was seemingly left behind. It was as though time ran at different speeds in their two different worlds.

As she watched the boy grow older with time, she began to feel a strange stirring in her heart from depths that she never knew existed. She was in love, she thought, with this strange boy from a different time. But the one she loved could not see her, nor feel her, nor ever reciprocate the feeling. He would go about his life in his world without ever knowing about the girl who watched him while he slept. In a few months he would have grown from a boy to a man, and she would still be thirteen. It was then the final puzzle piece of her incomplete soul fell in place. Her young heart was alive. For the first time she felt that her heart was alive, yet at the same time she could feel it beginning to break slowly and excruciatingly, until it would once again fade into naught. She told her family about the mysterious young man in her room, but whenever they rushed in they would find nothing but emptiness and echoes. From the look in their eyes she knew that none of them believed a word she was saying. To them, the boy was merely a fragment of her wild imagination, a passing notion not to be taken seriously. Even her beloved older brother could only shake his head in resignation when she told him about the boy who would never know her name. She had never felt so alone.

As her pain grew with each passing day, the girl withdrew into her little cocoon and began working on what would be her final impossible project. She had everything she needed - the blueprints, the cogs, the gears, and the magic of the forever clock – everything she needed to complete this feat of her imagination. It would work, she knew it would from every fibre of her soul. The forever clock would make sure of that. The spiral countdown chart in her room marked the number of days till the completion of her project and as that number grew smaller and smaller, her pain grew less and less until it was completely replaced with a new emotion altogether. Hope.

On Christmas Eve of her fourteenth year, she saw the boy for the last time. He was soundly asleep, just like he usually was. By now he looked about eighteen or nineteen and his handsome young face had matured well beyond his childhood days. With a bittersweet feeling in her heart, the girl took her pen and drew a tiny clock on his wrist, one that showed the time to be four o’clock. With that, she left. Without a trace.

He met her on Christmas Eve in the year two thousand, at four p.m. sharp. As he opened the door to leave, he stopped. It was as though an invisible force willed him to slow down his steps and turn back. As he turned to take a second look at the girl behind the counter, a feeling of familiarity dawned upon him, a feeling that had been lost to him for the past ten years. As he caught her eye, she smiled. He knew that smile, he had seen it many times before, once upon a long forgotten dream. Even while she smiled, she still did not recognise him, for time does funny things to one’s memories. But as the forever clock tolled in the distance, all at once, within the deepest reaches of their hearts, they knew.