Twilight

Somewhere in my neighbourhood, a house owns a grandfather chiming clock. I imagine it must also have a pendulum, because in the quietness of fourteen hundred hours every day, I can bet I hear a swish-swish in the air, like metal ripping gently through the wind, the pendulum swinging back and forth, marking time, time that only you and I can define. Every hour, the grandfather clock chimes, a majestic ding-dong-dong-dong, in a high baritone, making me jump.

It makes me slip off the time track, that ancient sound, as if resonating from a magnificent palace, perhaps a very large bungalow even, its hallways large and forty-feet high, light flooding through its laced windows, bouncing off its porcelain floors. A palace bungalow where the royalty has disappeared from, where only birds and winds and sunlight find time to dance, where dust gather like moss, where human beings do not remain to age anymore.

When the clock chimes, everything freezes for a split second. Everything goes back to its source. I feel the blankness envelop my head for those few moments and in those moments, nothing exists - even I don't. More so at twilight - when the world comes to a standstill, regardless of ancient grandfather chiming pendulum clocks.

The clock belongs to twilight. I wonder what came first - the sound that makes you silent in quiet remembrance of the place you come from, or twilight itself, freezing the world for a few seconds, turning it into the reality we evade all day.