Category: Revery

The tick tock of the clock divided the silence into tiny slices.

If only the clock would be still for a moment. But the pendulum swung inexorably, the time pretended to pass, the silence was destroyed every moment.

The officious clock parceled the stillness and dished it up in unusable little pieces.

He sat and listened for the stillness, nevertheless. The silence was there, like freedom seen in the gaps between the bars of the clock’s ticking. Quietness, achala, tick, nithya, tock, nothing, tick. If only the clock would be still for a moment. Tock.

That word. The one in a million. It fits like the last piece in a jigsaw. But it….it….eludes, that’s it, eludes the grasp of memory. It is like running to catch a bus in a dream, like a bit of jam in a bottle that the spoon is a millimetre too short to reach, like a…something that is something something. At times, when one is speaking, one pauses and gropes for le mot juste (the French sometimes have just the right words). The pause lengthens. The moments in the pause lengthen. It is not just pregnant, it is gravid (see?), with quadruplets, it is not just gravid (ha), it is four weeks overdue. One’s auditors watch one’s lips anxiously, and their mouths open and close in sympathy. They hold their breath. You could say any old thing and be done with it. But you know there’s a better word in there. Until you find it, er… will do.