The day they gave us legs
The day they gave us legs was the day we danced.
The leader who held a mirror up to the world kicked his feet in the air. "Legs," he shouted. "Legs," we echoed, pirouetting. We donned our headsets with newfound zeal, eager to try on new pairs of pants, tie our shoes, paint our toenails. We sat in bleachers at sports games, auditorium seats at lectures, collapsible cinema recliners at movie theaters, Herman-Miller-branded (-sponsored?) executive chairs at meetings. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave us a tour of the sky. We walked barefoot everywhere, elated. Never mind the fact that some of us didn't have legs in the old world and would have been fine if there had just been more ramps. "Legs," we traipsed. "Legs," we lunged.
We bent our legs, worshiping our respective gods, as the leader who held a mirror up to the world loomed tall, glistening.
The day they gave us hearts was the day we felt our hearts beating. The leader who held a mirror up to the world pulled together a pair of power cords and shocked us into rhythm. "Leg dub, leg dub," our hearts rejoiced. The blood rushed through us, warming our bodies. We quickened, burst, yearned.
We felt a hurtling and knew it to be love. So we fell in love: in words clumsily dictated to each other through the machine, in negotiations over which items to share from menus, in the headset-induced headaches we ignored for the mere possibility of backs of hands brushing against each other under decaying leaves.
Most of all, we fell in love with our legs: the way they dangled from thick branches, the way they recoiled like autonomous creatures when we tapped them on the knee, the tangled mess they formed together with our lovers' legs as we lay awake in bed.
The day they gave us eyes was the day we learned to see. We had eyes from the beginning, of course. Orbs with pupils and tints, but these eyes were different. The leader who held a mirror up to the world held a mirror up to the world and we looked back at ourselves. Our new eyes could tear, and we cried and cried and cried, first at the color and beauty of our surroundings, then at heartbreak, then at the tired pain in our legs. Our new eyes could close, and when we slept we dreamed of nothing but weightless, legless apparitions seeking closeness. We dreamed of the day they would just give us ramps. When we woke we noticed that the world in the mirror, a world that could have been anything, still demanded shoe tying. We noticed that the leader was still our leader. We noticed that the day they gave us legs was the day we gave ourselves.
The machine won't let me click the heart ideograph without asking me to subscribe, and when I subscribe, it won't let me click the heart ideograph without asking to subscribe, so instead I am typing a comment to say that I appreciate this post, because it expresses my exact feelings on this matter. Thank you. And now I shall click on the little green "Post" button and see if it asks me to subscribe . . .
Oof this one hit me. Loving the form of this sort of sci fi short story.