the moment that never existed
It was your usual Sunday afternoon. 1:49 to be precise. (why should you be precise? its a sunday! sacrilege.) It was my usual Sunday morning. The tea was on boil and i was browsing habitually through the multiple tabs open on my firefox browser. and as is the case with multiple tabs, none was interesting enough to hold me, but they formed a continuum, a circle of curiosity swimming in circles around my mind, and i couldn't break that circle. so i kept on surfing. switching the tabs. scrolling down and then up. then switching to the next tab. clicking on one link or another. then with impatience switching to next pane... furious and numb, simultaneously.
psssss.... the tea was boiling over, overflowing onto the hot plate. I threw my keyboard sideways and jumped into my kitchen. I was about to take the tea pot off the plate, when a bird exploded merely 3 metres from me outside of kitchen window. Poof. no sound. no smoke. just a lot of feathers that formed a bird once which now were scattered mid air. I barely had registered the bird. Birds have long being extinct in our housing colony here. perhaps that's how new species come into existence. poof. but shouldn't it form and fly away, instead of going poof and disintegrating then? hmm.. anyways.
The bird was ridiculously colorful, like the ones they show in National Geographic channel when they talk about rain forests and such. It also had a very long beak and a large eye. well, i am sure it did have another eye too, but i could only see one. and it was large and staring at me. or so it seemed. It felt as if the bird was here to steal something. but my gaze rendered him existence-less. it doesn't make sense, i know, but that's what i felt. when was the last time you could make sense of what you felt?
A sort of panic took hold of me. I felt as if I was under threat, as if I was losing control of my space. My home was under threat.
In my shock, it took me a little while to realise that I had spilled the hot tea on my hands and it was burning like hell. and as soon as I realised that and gave out a slow 'ow', about to grab a napkin, the door bell rang. I wouldn't have minded it. But it was as if the person on the other side knew that I won't bother, so he/she/it kept the bell on ringing continuously.
and a clock cuckoo came out of my wall clock. it had just turned 1:50 pm. and it wasn't even a cuckoo clock. where the fuck did the cuckoo come from? it took me a while to register that there was the other anomaly of it not being 2 or 3 pm for the cuckoo to come out.. it was 1:50 pm. and the third anomaly was, as the cuckoo came out from nowhere, the door bell stopped ringing.
and then silence. utter alien silence. it was as if some invisible vacuum cleaner came in and sucked out all the sound and sanity that existed in that room. Poof.
I was scared. scared is a small word. i was fucking SCARED.
I desperately wanted to feel my heartbeat. I was scared that I might lose control of even that. and I had. I was perspiring and breathing very rapidly. In the middle of the day, my room with open windows was filled with darkness. It was weird. There was light outside, but none could come inside. and the front door's edges were glowing in sharp florescent light of the hallway.
and then I had a revelation.. I was still standing. I was expecting myself to have collapsed by now. The abnormality had hit me with amazing force. But here I was, standing.
So, I gathered some courage and gingerly opened the door ever so slightly. The usually noisy hinges were absolutely soundless. I thought I had gone deaf, and soon will go blind. So I unnecessarily squinted my eye in hope of protecting it from god-knows-what-kind-of-alien light. And i peeked outside. The hallway was empty but for a large incongruity. There was a large shoe moving ever so imperceptibly in the hallway. and when i say large, i mean 13 ft in length and 6 ft in height at least. There was no foot in it. Neither any socks. Just a old school black shoe with black laces. It was well polished and was a little dirty underneath. and it was moving. I felt as if it was moving, I could swear that it was moving. But it didn't seem like it. I don't know how long I was staring at it, it could have been years or seconds, I wouldn't know. It just disappeared. poof.
I smashed the door closed. Ran back inside. and sat down 4 feet from the front door. I had my head bent low on my legs. I had turned into a shell. A raging curiosity consumed me. But for reasons unknown, I was trying to suppress it. I just wished to see the time again. It felt as if years had passed between my opening and closing the door. I wanted to confirm it. But something told me, that me observing the time would set something in motion again. I was scared of triggering something anew. But how long can one go on with a head bent low? (lifetimes actually. but this was different. so lets agree on 'not for long')
The now-cuckoo-less clock was still showing 1:50 pm. but that didn't mean years had not passed. I had to check the year. I should have thought of checking time on my computer. But the glowing rectangle was thrown out of conscience at that point in time. Instead i ran to the kitchen. I drained out the remaining (clue: still fresh) tea. and there it was. beneath the burnt tea leaves was a ticking-tocking digital wrist watch. 300m water resistant. Casio model of 1990s perhaps. I didn't know how I knew, but I instinctively knew that the watch would be here.
and it said 2012. it essentially said that not a moment had passed since the poof of bird. that cuckoo and the shoe and the agonising limbo were not witnessed by time. It was as if me and my time was abducted and returned without my consent. That this time was stretched out and severed from the universal time as if it were the appendix of my time's body.
Two things happened then. very ridiculous things.
1. i foolishly felt relieved of the 'episode' having ended. (not so fast)
2. compulsively I wore the wrist watch on my left hand..
I shouldn't have done that. I seriously should not have done that...
To be continued.
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