The Twirls

It was a perfect moment. A perfect moment for him to do what he always did in such a condition. The whole city was suffering from electricity breakdown and his room too was in pitch dark. Not that he didn’t have the alternate source for lighting up his room but he wanted to be in the dark. He opened the window to half to let the sound of the night in – the sound of crickets creaking from the lawn and a dog barking in some distant street. Finally he laid his favorite pillow on the bed and lied down on his back but soon had to change to the side with his legs curled up to his tummy and his left hand covering his eyes. It was always the best position to have it. Feeling comfortable, he closed his eyes and waited for it to befall upon him. Slowly it came and spread all over, around and inside him like the thick white mist engulfs and penetrates in to the trees, looming in the dark valleys in cold winter nights. But it was not chilly or piercing. It was warm and comforting like a mother’s womb, which offers no spare space to any intruder but the unborn itself. Soon he was unaware of the darkness, the cricket and the distant dog – "the environment" he had created around him. He was in utmost tranquility. But he knew that it’s not going to last forever. He was going to experience what he called “the twirls”.

At last he saw it and like previous times, rushed towards it hurriedly. It was a fiercely twirling spindle – the one which is used to spin thread from wool. But he never noticed any thread attached to this one. It was not quite big. It was as big as an ordinary spindle would be. He felt himself about the same size as the spindle. Perhaps, the swirls of the spindle had created immense attraction in it that he felt like touching it. He knew that once he did that, it will wrap his whole body around itself like a thin strip of linen, though it never happened in his earlier experiences. Nevertheless, he had always tried and he tried this time too and failed again. So, like always he felt himself sitting beside the spindle and watching it in fascination like the charmed one. The grrrh – grrrh – grrrh of the swirls was imbuing his whole self with anticipation and tantalizing his feelings of the next. The scenes now started to roll over the spindle - the scenes of the selected clips from his past. Every time, a picture appeared, it seemed to couple with something, happened somewhere, and singled it out from his memory store in an unfolding strand, allowing it to drift freely around him in his “environment”. He could correlate a whole story with each one of it and felt the presence of those moments which were no more.

The speed with which the spindle was twirling was dwindling now. But by now, he had a lot of those strands dancing around him – colorful and oscillating here and there. He kept chasing them somewhat frantically – kept playing with them until all of them diffused in to the darkness, one by one, like the fireflies disappear if one tries to chase them. That was when he realized where he was. He opened his eyes and turned the lights on. For a moment he was incensed and had to squint but then he smiled with content. He had just revisited past.