Austria,

You have complained of the ticking sound of your watch before. Normal. The watch is new to you.

You are accustomed to silence. New pitches and tones, humming and questions and confessions, fill it. Not bad, just new.

The watch stays on your wrist (the wrong wrist, may I remind you). Time lets you both take comfort in the ticking sound and expect it. Things are no longer so quiet.

Still, I see you wear it every day, a part of you just as much as the hands themselves.

There are certain clocks, the kind that I wear, that use quartz to keep time. These are electrical. The quartz resonates at a defined frequency, and this transfers to the circuit.

Without this quartz, the clock in question is not good for much; without a circuit, the clock in question is merely a collection of parts.

The trick is to cut the quartz right, and your next step is to ensure the reception of the frequencies can become marked seconds (the job of the circuit, as you know).

Done correctly, these are more accurate than mechanical clocks. Done poorly, they fail, and valuable bits and pieces are rendered useless. Never perfect, no matter the quartz and circuit, that is not their nature. But useful and good.

The goal is to tell the time, yes, but the goal is also to craft something worth using. Not to say that the quartz is not precious, that the circuit is not impressive, not at all. But the clock will be more so, and perhaps they are better placed there.

Perhaps something constructive and wonderful is the combination of these parts. To do something they cannot do alone.

Take care not to chip the outside, of course, but there is always something to come back to when the quartz and circuit still have potential to create, second by second, flawed and beautiful noise.

Sincerely,

Switzerland