April 23
2011
I am exhausted, somewhat exasperated from working round the clock. I have recently step foot inside a new business, a new dimension of my life, a new approach to sanity. Or not! Who am I to judge?
Anyway, it's 2:30 in the noon. I am at my store and there is no one to serve. I steal a glance at the disgruntled faces of my employees enduring their crumbling feet, fighting an urge to lay down naked and sleep forever. Their body language defies the fact that their assiduous nature is of any healthy value to me. Yet, I must press on, for there is no other alternative. I have squandered over my resources long enough to see them dwindling.
It’s been 4 hours since I last saw my salesman frown at me. I must leave for a short while or else he'd barge on me any minute now. I take a break and storm out of my store. Sensing a respite, I arrive at a sequestered spot, a gumti, if you will, for my, well, physical needs.
As I light up a cancer stick, I feel alone. The tobacco gushes slowly into my blood and drowns my stress like the sun gradually feeding upon the darkness. I begin to sense a bonhomie slowly flaring within my lungs.
Midway through my cigarette, I realise a familiar face standing next to me still oblivious to my existence. I look into my past for a flick and it strikes me. It’s the guy I once pounded upon when we were kids. He had stolen my eraser and I was pretty sure he was the one. Recalcitrant though he was, he never accepted it and ended up with a big fat lower lip. I was stronger then. Pulpy yet massive enough to beat the shit out of irascible punks like him.
Now was a scenario I had never thought I'd have to dread. He was twice the size I once used to be. I was pretty sure he must not have forgotten me. And also sure he'd take less than a minute to beat the heck out of me. Yet an overwhelming stupidity compelled me to do something that made me confront one of the most significant needs of living inside a human skin.
I snuck up to him and mouthed, literally mouthed the words, “Hey!”
He turned, stared at me for about 3 seconds and his nostrils almost flared. I felt a belch rumbling up my stomach as I saw him raising his arm towards me. Anything he did next was totally acceptable given I deserved my share of fair deal. Killing all my intuitive instincts, he took me by surprise, threw me the most honest smile and embraced me like he had never embraced anyone before. He immediately greeted me with words you don’t generally speak out to someone you have been grudging against for a long while. Before I could dive inside his mind, he started mentioning anecdotes from our past that were surprisingly funny for two enemy cowboys from hell.
20 minutes of talking and I realized he had changed. So much so that I wanted to thank him for not crushing me to the ground He was no longer the annoying bully he once was. He had put on a little weight that could have instigated me to create some irony but I was ok with the situation. Besides, his body fat now was much decentralized in density than my memory of his terrifying fat lip. We talked for three hours that day. Forgetful of the fact that this friendly chit chat would be at the cost of my business, I kept talking.
As I talked, countless opposing thoughts forced their way through my mind. Why couldn’t I hate him? Why was I experiencing a sense of affinity for the same man I once wanted to gun down and bury several feet into the ground?
I realized the erratic nature of time that day. I sensed how the hardest times have a transient nature. How even the strangest situations solve themselves out over time. How people change, some deliberately, some unknowingly. No matter how stable, unending, stagnant and unyielding it seems, time changes. That’s a fact. It might change for the better for some. It might become a nightmare for some. These contrasting cases are absolutely natural. But the fact that they are going to happen simultaneously is equally natural too. And this phenomenon is exactly what humans need to exist.
We need change, whether it is for the good or bad, we desperately need it. It is this change that provides us with a bit of enthusiasm to handle the unchangeable within us and around us.
Time I guess is not just a counting system with numbers changing periodically like clockwork. It’s a system of evolution arranged in a simple network of digits with meaning attached to them.
