The silence of the lockdown

Hear the clock ticking and the flutter of unturned calendar pages

No matter how much we love staying indoors, monotony grabs us at some point. But, sometimes, that boredom is the best opportunity to get acquainted with ourselves, something which we hardly spend time on. Well, that is one aspect of it. Besides introspection, I feel that it is also a chance to perceive differently the surrounding stagnancies, especially if we are quarantined, bonding only to everything inside the four walls. Just back from campus, I was not yet over the pangs of the sudden pack-up. It was a direct journey from my hostel in Hyderabad to my room in a corner of Kerala, with zero scope for layovers or a welcome hug, since my family had vulnerable elder members. In the beginning, I used to just lean back on my bed all day, with puffed eyes, wistfully ruminating the exciting days and memorable goodbyes I would have gotten and said, had it not been for the virus. However, this cloud also seems to have a silver lining somewhere. In the last year of college, my friend and I had restructured our hostel room to make it feel at home. We painted our walls in lavender and white and adorned them with dangling, yellow monochrome lights. We used to cherish the delicate dim lights falling gracefully over the snaps of memories framed and chronicled above them. It was a warm and cosy place where our friends often gathered to share food, movies, and woes alike. I could never have imagined then that in a few days, I would be caught in this tight and unfortunate lockdown, falling back on those good old days for solace.