On the bus. It’s a sticky afternoon and you don’t realise how tired you are from staying up late until your eyes can be left open no more. You are reclining, which adds to more snatches of sleep punctuated only when the person next to you wants to get off; or due to immediate jarring jams on the brakes, or the last dregs of sunlight that somehow cause a sizeable flash on your face or the perfect ring-tone that jolts you back to life. You don’t really know how many times you woke alert or how many times you went to sleep.

But that hardly matters. For when you get off and walk, you remember the bus ride to be long

but your watch says that it’s just slightly over half an hour. So you have stretched time, and you want to do more, you want to get on another ride.

Or if you are not tired (still on the bus) the whirr of the smoke-spewing engine sinks you in the stream of time and you think of things. Maybe about a walk you took down a half-deserted street a year or so ago, maybe about eyes and limbs and fingers, tongues, fringes, lashes or giggles. Yes, giggles that, through a slight oversight on your part, got into your skin and ran their fingers along your spine so that the hair on your hand stood on ends. Perhaps you think of a future to be envied or pasts you can only shed. The breeze that finds its way through the window assails your face as you lay helpless, your cheeks peeling off. Words off the conversation from the seat behind or from the seat in front or from anywhere else catch their feet on the crowns of teeth and fall out of mouths, and eventually find your ears. More things fall, and by the time you realise, there is no more space in your mind, that chest of yours is hollow and inflated. Wanting things or people beside you.

In the classroom. The teacher is not there, therefore there is din instead. The sound-waves of all varying frequencies superpose and they form a sort of stationary wave that doesn’t seem to rise in frequency any more. This superposition swirls into your ears and makes everything in you go in unending circles–the circumference never meets, and one circle follows another and then another inside itself, like water going down the sink. And so you sink in the soothing noisy assortment of sounds that are no more distinct. That is, when you feel hollow again. Sometimes ideas take bloom in this same fertile air populated by unchained laughter, unchained gossips, unchained silences of the laconic, even unchained explanations on the number of eclipses the earth will have if there are two moons. Unchained everything. A paper there, a pen over it, poised.

At night. You always have the headphones on. Playing through them might be the muffled and palliative notes of Small Plane or the quick, unadorned and repeating sharp ones of From the Morning, or Place to Be, or Parasite. And finally, sometimes, there is harp and the shrill, emollient voice, at times languid and lazy and at other times immediate, kicking and screaming. But always graceful and all-powerful. There are these, and there is the night. It pares off those hundreds of masks you have been adding to your face, one by one. And you are sad and melancholy. Then Fly comes on filtering, thrusting through your ears and there are more thoughts to think of, more screwing of eyes to pull off surprises–that’s when you know you are lost in and at the mercy of the labyrinth of time. There is the need of a second grace, of another face. There are metaphors and there is poetry all the time, but never solace. The hollow chest forgets about toes that pressed on it, and the fingers grow longer and don’t slot quite rightly into other hands. Limbs grow to never grow backwards and thoughts get implanted in the mind, never to be erased–always growing and spreading, always virulent. There is always night and there is always this restlessness.

And even though you’re getting off your past and searching for the future, even if the sunlight is around and you’re turning brown, even if you spit a huge glob of thrown coal like a cornered rat and you want to be handed down and given a place to lie as you are, you’re listless and alone and adrift in the curve that time lays out in front of you. And you know that wretched souls condemned to years of loneliness don’t get a second opportunity on earth.

Duwal is a 12th grader