“It was concerning that time was relative“, Aanya said to herself still looking at the cranky invention on her hands. It was no larger than a pocket watch, its exterior made of metal plates that rumbled with complex gears that worked on their own. Her right friend Kael had picked up from beneath the heap of many-sided scratchy books and unnecessarily old trinkets in his great-grandfather’s house. “It’s broken“, he had said, but Aanya was not convinced either. There was something energetically rigid in it and something ominous in how it seemed to quiver beneath her touch.
The first time it happened, it was like a dream came through. They had been fiddling around with it, pressing the buttons when twisting the knobs and then laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing looked. The atmosphere around them became charged, electrified so to say; there was a power that came with them. Then, in the blink of an eye, they weren’t in the attic anymore; instead, they were out in the middle of a sunny meadow as far as they could tell.
Initially, it was an adventure. The world was indeed their playground. They spin the dial of the machine and each time they open their eyes at a different time in history. They observed the futuristic cities at work, stomped around the splendid in antiquity of temples and watched history unfold right in front of them! It felt like freedom they have never experienced in their lives— an opportunity to move on from the rather repetitive existence.
But the wonder didn’t last. When they attempted to go back for help, they failed. Couldn’t go back. Kael tried to laugh it off. “It’s just a glitch“, he said, fiddling with the machine. But it was full of uproar and Aanya could sense the crazy look in his eyes that was coated in the thinnest layer of desperation. Days became weeks or, at least, this is what it looked like. The difference of time inside the loop had been restrained. They would wake and have the same morning, go through the same hours, and sleep and wake under the same sky, and then do it again.
Aanya began to notice things. That meadow was hiding far from being that peaceful. He knew that the flowers, if she tried to best look at them, always had edges, as if someone had drawn them. The bees moved in circles and ran in loops in the same routines over and over again. Not even sunlight, which was rich and honeyed in its million watts summer glory felt entirely real in this place, and as if they were all simply actors in an unending play.
“Perhaps it isn’t?“, said she one day, as Kael worked on the gears for the one hundredth time. “It might be that this is what was intended to happen“.
Kael stopped dead in his tracks, the wrench that clutched in his hand fell out of his hands and clattered onto the pavement. “You mean to tell me that we are supposed to be here on this embassy for eternity?”
“Not here“, Aanya replied. “I think it’s testing us. It is not a measure of time—but a measure of layers or rings like circles made in water. But why do we find ourselves inside one sometimes and the only way to get out is to know why.“
Together, they were to start watching the loop, looking for the signs that the loop cast in its sphere. They mapped the meadow and got Michiko’s details of it. They laid bare their fears and desires to each other in a way that conversations between them hadn’t been before. Gradually, they started perceiving the loop more in terms of a silvered mirror which was holding something they had turned a blind eye to.
It was at this moment when the sun went down for the hundredth, maybe thousandth time that same day, that Aanya stretched her hand to the machine. “Perhaps it is not where we are headed“, she said, turning the gear that was never ever turned before. “Perhaps it’s true about how one has to go“.
It was as if the air was rippling, wavy like water and time, the air between the trees stopped for a moment and the words surged out of the air like a release of air bubbles from water. Then there was a sound of a dry snapping of twigs and the meadow was gone, and they were within the attic, the machine motionless in her grasp.
Kael exhaled shakily. “What just happened?”
Aanya smiled faintly. “I believe one of the lessons we appeared to grasp into is the art of letting go.”
To read more blogs like this, click here
Writer
Jemi Sailuk
Intern, Content Writing Department
YSSE