A stillness in time

I don’t know how the place beyond my wall came to be. Frankly, I’m not sure what it is. I stumbled upon it one day while tidying my room on a Sunday afternoon. Although cleaning gave me solace away from my studies, it was only a distraction from the work I inevitably had to complete. An untidy bed and a few lumps of dirty clothes really weren’t much to worry about but, ultimately, a distraction was a distraction. I spent close to an hour rummaging and organizing before I noticed behind a bookshelf a small tear in my wall. How it is physically possible for a wall to tear is beyond me but it was definitely torn, like paper.

I was drawn to the hole by earnest curiosity only to find myself being forcefully pulled into it as I tumbled through and lost all sense of direction. It was as if I’d tripped into a nebulous ocean of darkness rolling through oblivion until not a moment later my back lay flat on the bedroom carpet. Dazed, I stood cautiously to assess my surroundings but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Blowing it off as sleep-deprived confusion, I continued my cleaning, but, eventually, I realized something was off. I sensed an unnatural stillness that lingered like a dense mist permeating the air. Nothing stirred and all sound was stifled. Even outside, the birds’ chirps were muffled by the intensity of the silence. It wasn’t until much much later after I’d finished cleaning and I’d done my work that I realized, as strange as it was, no time had passed at all since then. It felt like more than 3 hours had transpired, yet the sun was just as bright in the sky and the clock remained fixed in its position at 4:32.

I dismissed the ludicrous idea but as my perception of time wore on without a change in the day, the absurd became reality. Only then did I think to check the mysterious tear in the wall I had found earlier. I peeked behind the bookshelf and it happened as it did before. I was snatched from my spot and thrown into a space of whirling cosmic opacity before being spat back out to the world feeling mild shock and bewilderment. The mist dissipated and the clock resumed ticking and the birds chirped freely, for I’d returned to normalcy. 

Soon, my visits to the Stillness grew frequent and in length. For every need, break, escape, or excuse, I looked to the Stillness to resolve it. Though I had no accurate way of measuring time in a place with no time, I recall watching 8 seasons of television, reading three books, and finishing over 50 pages of schoolwork in one visit alone. And it only worsened from there.    

With such an abundance of time, you learn to forget its value. Time should run freely like sand through your fingers where as soon as you grasp for a moment, it’s already gone. But when you can stop the flow and gather what you desire, life’s chase is replaced by comfort which turns to laziness and then greed. The passage of time became obsolete, and despite my constant visits to the hidden seclusion, I failed to recognize its danger before it was too late. There is no tear in the wall behind my bookshelf. It sealed one day, who knows how long ago. I was listening to rain as I finished a paper but when I started to leave there was no hole to trip through any longer.

I’m resigned to live out eternity in the place beyond my wall where rain constantly falls and the clock reads 2:01. Though my body has not changed, my mind has more than ripened: it’s hard to say how old you are when you’re constantly in limbo. Every passing moment is but another reminder of what I’ve lost, what I can never lose and what awaits me forever. Nothing in the universe really is as boundless as time—or boredom, for that matter.