10 Cent

Big Fishes Carnival at The Lake - 10 Cent

A story may have an awesome protagonist, an evil mastermind as a villain, a whole new world to discover. A story may also contains something very profound, or something very close to us: love, relationship, ideals. These striking premises are good to have because by having a string of words that describe the story partially, you get people to read it. A story may have all these overwhelmingly interesting stuff, but it need not have.

For example, the story of a 10 cent coin.

A mere 10 cent coin, held between the thumb and the index finger, may shine beautifully if held in the right angle, the right direction, the right time. But most of the time it doesn’t. For most it is just another 10 cent coin that half the population of the world are dying to get, another half dying to get rid of it. No matter how much I stare at a very little piece of humanity’s most treasured creation, it did not get any more interesting. Well, nor any less in that matter.

A 10 cent coin didn’t exist before we invented them. We are not dying to have a symbol of property in the prehistoric ages, and if there were to conduct experiments about human living without such existence, we might only see slight changes. True, the civilization under such experiment may develop some form of currency on its own, but it doesn’t necessarily manifest as a piece of a flat, round nickel that had a very elaborate picture engraved on one side, and the number 10 on the other.

“You should probably stop doing that. You know, that narration thing,” the girl sitting next to me pouted, refused to look at me in the eye. Apparently I am under my own suspicion regarding leaks of the process of monologue thinking that is probably slipping between the lips. “That and thinking about such an insignificant view of an insignificant object.”

“Oh, shut it,” I simply replied, still fully assured that I had not mentioned about the nonexistence of a love story in my narration. Seeing how mesmerized I was with the negligible amount of what we equate to power, she went to the kitchen albeit her absolute inability in cooking. Well, you need to calm a raging girlfriend, so I put the biggest smile and followed her inside. The details of our flirting are of no important concern.

Seeing how I have the time to stare and appreciate such a minuscule metal may incur an excellent question within you: who am I and what did I do for a living. In this world, people are busy. In a bus, there are tons of different people with different reason, different responsibility and different restriction that drives them into utilizing the most convenient machinery before the computer – vehicles. Every morning every person take every possible route to reach to any possible bus stop at which every kind of buses with every possible route might pass by. The bus driver, seeing another hectic day will need to spend his entire day paying attention to the bus stop signals and the people coming in and coming out. It is a busy world, and in this world I’m one of those lucky enough to inherit a large company that basically runs on its own and give me money.

So what do I do everyday? I try to create. I pay a very profound writer to teach me many things how to write, and then I attempt to write about her. I pay a very talented artist to help me understand the way of the canvas, to infuse life into the paintings of her. I go to different relative’s houses and tell them about her and our lives and our relationship. I write a blog using her account that describes her everyday lives. I mark the calendar of the whole company so that they know when her birthday is. I pay a genius programmer to create an elaborate artificial intelligence, with the help of a psychologist to forge the human element in it, while having her as the template for everything. Lately, I’m funding a research about the structuring of human body from its constituent elements that we can find around, as well as a brain-computer hybrid that can be implanted in a person’s body so that he/she can easily receive data directly to the brain. A lot of useless stuff, it seems. But you do stuff for love, don’t you?

Apparently my leaks in narration leads her to an interesting conclusion: that I was doing everything that is centered around her. As oblivious as I made her to be, she still came to the crucial realization, and once she did so she saw no point in everything I do. After all, nothing goods comes out of doing things for her – nothing comes out of it, in fact. But as cheesy as it sound, a man in love will do everything that needed to be done for his beloved.

In one of our heated arguments she finally asked the important question – why. I still remember it, oh yes; we were at the hill watching the sunset, when she started confirming her theory. The way I could see to her eyes and through them and to the setting sun behind them, I couldn’t help but tell the truth – accept the truth to be precise. So if she really was but a figment of my imagination, she asked why I did all I did. My answer was simple.

“I’m driving you into existence.”

The value of a 10 cent coin is but fiction. Presenting such a thing to those deprived of knowledge is very much like casting a pearl on a swine. We need to know – and be assured – that it is valuable for it to be valuable to us. Therefore, while a round piece of nickel in my hand naturally exist, its value and purpose is something that we infuse to it – and to ourselves.  As a result, the value and the demand for an accumulation of 10 cent coins are very much real and affects many people in different ways. We created the valuable 10 cent; we drove it into existence. As long as people can believe, it exists. As long as people can believe, she can exist.