He’d left it out for a long time and it had soured. He hadn’t taken the best care of it since it had been given to him, and on some level that was because he didn’t know what it was. He had not recognised that it was shared out amongst the unit he was a part of of, and if he had taken care of it there would have been more to go around.
Some people think that they are awake because they are loud, and they try and use that volume to force others to raise their own volume. Some people learn in silence, and they watch, and they try to use that silence as a notional space in which they might build the apparatus to move forward into the future. She smashed the silence, and she crushed the space in which the apparatus might be built, and in doing so she helped to destroy the future.
He was part of the problem though, because he had made the future dependent upon an idea, and a thing he had not yet built, and he had not built it upon the foundation that was there. He looked to the future and she was deeply invested in making something of the present. Her experience of other people’s visions of the future was that they turned into broken promises. Action in the present was proof, and the future would take care of itself.
And did either of them think of the children? The children who were given smaller portions of it; who had been given portions which they could only grow in a safe environment? No, because sometimes people are selfish, and they damage other by operating in the altered orbit of their own damage. How long did it all take to fall apart? They didn’t know – because they had stopped tending it, and they only realised their error when the sky fell upon them unannounced.