Time Travel

Last night, my heart leapt four thousand three hundred and eighty days back in time. 

Every fortnight I make a visit home. To the place where I grew up, amidst prayers, Bible readings, commentaries and endless Hillsong tracks. It's a ritual, more or less, to dust through old books and half-filled journals, the nights I spend here. And as certain as I am of not finding anything new, every page my fingers graze exudes a different scent each time. Every sentence, a different meaning. And to me who left home at 16 to escape the vagaries of religion and unwritten moral codes, this visit is an act of redemption, from memories of a family that was in perpetual sorrow owing to a teenager's eccentricities. 

"I know exactly what I'm doing," a line from the 2006 journal read. I sigh deep. A quarter waltz into life, the only thing I am sure of is death. Not life. Not career. Not love. Death. Everything else is a maybe. A could be. A might. A could have. A should have. 

I move on to the "memory box." And this is where it usually ends - the long, pondering nights - with this box, that hold my fondest moments in the form of a handful of sand from the beaches of Goa, balled into a newspaper; a sticky note from class 7, once used by a boy I had a crush on for two years; a chit from class 8, passed on to me by a girl who was known for her shiny, long hair and straight A's, asking me to "share running notes from science period"; a class photograph with a large hole in place of my head; and a few tidbits collected over time in attempts to stop its march towards the vast unknown, for nights like these.

The ceiling fan has grown old with our home. Making Kerala summers unbearable, it creaks to a halt every now and then. Maybe, like time, it is trying to say something. To slow down. To go back in time. And I listen. I shut the box and push it into the metal shelf that has become stubborn with rust. Time has slowed it down too.

I pull up the blanket. My left foot sticks out, feeling the slow motion of air within the room where a girl once stuck stars to the roof to carry the sky with her. The clock ticks. It's 1. At the next stammer of the fan, I am all set to move a hundred more days back in time.