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the story of how

    You may not know this, or remember it, but there was a time when there were planets. There were grasshoppers too, but you wouldn't know about those. They were the first ones to go.

    Back then, nobody quite understood, but many theories have been written and many historians have debated since. Since it all went away. I have a theory myself but well, it's somewhat of my grandfather's really, or maybe his grandfather's dad. That's how most things are now, most of us only pick up on what our elders have to say.

    You see back then, according to grandfather that is, people had their own thoughts on things, such as planets and grasshoppers, and they made an effort to continuously investigate them. And because of that, things were still around, bound to each other, not by gravity, nor the food chain, no, nothing like that. Rather, because people would think to talk about them. It may sound too obvious for you now, but try and put yourself back at that time, they were oblivious to such knowledge. They were, as you'll find out, mostly distracted by less urgent things.

    It all started with the grasshoppers, and from there on things kept going away. At first, people noticed. They would ponder over it and make many estimates, graphs and opinions. But after a while it wasn't of much interest really, and that's when it really began. 

    The outer planets, they were the first to leave. Uranus, Neptune and even that dazzling Saturn made its way. Sure! We still had our eyes on Mars then, we just weren't paying enough attention to see that Venus had already slipped away. The moon kept creeping up and down, till nobody talked about it anymore. But we gotta give it to the Moon, it really tried its best. It ran full for many years, sometimes a pale red, sometimes a burning gold, but that just wasn't enough. Not for us. We grew accustomed, and one day it didn't rise at all.

     The asteroids, in an attempt to fetch our interest, past right by us in rocketing rage. They even chipped off parts of our mountains, scattered our lakes. But it only distracted us. To much of their disappointment, we quickly forgot about them.

     The frogs and the bees, those didn't last long. We started forgetting about birds, and nobody cared for their songs. Planes were the only things that flew, because we still talked and we complained about them. But only for a while. The sky and the clouds held for a bit, but left around the same time as the bears, we talked so much about buildings and cars that they all faded away. We talked about lines and about ourselves and how fat and how old we would get. Those were our favorite things. So they didn't go away. We kept growing older, we kept growing fatter.

    The sun, like the moon, made an effort to stay. It moved farther away when we were too hot and came back when we were too cold, until we forgot what it was there for. History, well, that went away as well. The sea, the ships, dead poets, the explorers and everything they wrote, simply evaporated. Gravity left at some point, though no one was quite sure where it was to begin with. Apparently even words started disappearing, as our thoughts began to narrow.

   And that's how all those things parted ways. Why you've never seen a bear, heard songs or ever danced. 

    My grandfather told me, how his grandfather's great grandfather told him, how interesting it was the day when dogs and cats and the people you knew, the last things we could talk about, just started flying away. How still we kept talking about ourselves in the hope that we wouldn't

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