You are not mistaken. This is the house you are looking for. Come in.
You look amazed! Is it these dead clocks? It is one of my husband's little quirks. He never fixed a dead clock; always bought a new one instead. He let them all hang on the wall like a joke. “Clocks are pretty things,” he used to say, “but is time really tethered to their hands? Time goes on even when clocks stop ticking. Nothing mirrors the passage of time better than we ourselves”.
People fear time and respect age. I regard neither. A brown, bleeding evening, my friend and I murmured in the sickening silence of the school lavatory, I learnt that grey hairs have little to do with respect. She told me how her drunken father loved her by night. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to hide in the toilet that night and every night since that. She said love is disgusting and painful. I wonder where she hides now.
I married the man who made most sense to me. He was a poet. He made no empty promises or pompous claims. He was someone who weighed his words well. Of course, my parents couldn't understand when I told them that I cannot be with anyone else. All they saw was that he was twice my age. Is it ominous to dream about death on your own wedding day?
Many a spring passed. He aged before my eyes. Once he asked me what I would do if he died. Both of us knew the world will move on. We lived moment by moment. I cajoled time to be kind on him. I should have known that if love was blind, time was deaf. Today, here I am among these dead clocks with only his silence to share this room.
Some lock themselves up in the prison house of memories, either good or bad; some get lost in the mirror maze of dreams. But all of us are inevitably captives of time. And we age fighting with it till death comes and bails us out. I am… no, it doesn’t matter. I am someone you met one day, at a time.
You look amazed! Is it these dead clocks? It is one of my husband's little quirks. He never fixed a dead clock; always bought a new one instead. He let them all hang on the wall like a joke. “Clocks are pretty things,” he used to say, “but is time really tethered to their hands? Time goes on even when clocks stop ticking. Nothing mirrors the passage of time better than we ourselves”.
People fear time and respect age. I regard neither. A brown, bleeding evening, my friend and I murmured in the sickening silence of the school lavatory, I learnt that grey hairs have little to do with respect. She told me how her drunken father loved her by night. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to hide in the toilet that night and every night since that. She said love is disgusting and painful. I wonder where she hides now.
I married the man who made most sense to me. He was a poet. He made no empty promises or pompous claims. He was someone who weighed his words well. Of course, my parents couldn't understand when I told them that I cannot be with anyone else. All they saw was that he was twice my age. Is it ominous to dream about death on your own wedding day?
Many a spring passed. He aged before my eyes. Once he asked me what I would do if he died. Both of us knew the world will move on. We lived moment by moment. I cajoled time to be kind on him. I should have known that if love was blind, time was deaf. Today, here I am among these dead clocks with only his silence to share this room.
Some lock themselves up in the prison house of memories, either good or bad; some get lost in the mirror maze of dreams. But all of us are inevitably captives of time. And we age fighting with it till death comes and bails us out. I am… no, it doesn’t matter. I am someone you met one day, at a time.
:-)
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