The Stopwatch

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Childhood registers many memories that stay within those corners of our heart, where we forget to visit. An impulse of such a memory from old childhood days, suddenly struck my mind today, when I was in a meeting and for keeping a sense of time, I pulled the wrist watch under my sleeve. Those were the days when I was a superhero.

I was as curious at that time, as a child of my age was supposed to be. I could never get any chance to explore the big blue metallic almirah my father had, but I always had that desire to explore it, though I knew it was full of old books and files. The thing that actually intrigued me, was the dark, small locker box it had, which had a separate key, I never got hold of. I always wanted to know, what was inside. That day, when father was not around, I found that key kept secretly in a leather pouch, I could not resist to open the box. The feeling was nothing less that of Alladin exploring the magic lamp for the first time.

The box was a little above the height of my forehead. It was dark and I put my tiny hand inside. Apart from some papers and keys, I felt a circular solid thing whose shape was not registered in the tactile-sense dictionary of my mind. I pulled it out, and it was a watch, I had never seen before. It was a little bigger than the normal wrist watch with white dial and a black knob at the top of it, surrounded by a small ring. There was no movement of any of the hands and I figured that it was some old watch my father had kept which had stopped working. That evening when father was at home, he explained me what that thing was. It was a Stopwatch, which is used to keep a track of time. My curiosity had introduced a new thing to me that day.

I was in love with that watch. The one thing that made it superior than the other watches was it could actually hold the time. It had power to start, pause and resume, whenever I required. I was free from the dependency of running with the world to match the invisible dimension called time. For me it was more than a watch. It was a super gadget with which I had power of manipulating with the time in my own small world, by a single press of the knob. I never measured how much time it took for me to reach school, but I measured how many times I stopped and looked at it as if everything else had also stopped around me. I used to sing songs and suddenly stop with the press of the knob, and then resume it again. Because of my super gadget I controlled almost every second of my life, the way I liked. It really felt like a superhero because I had the most powerful gadget with me.

I don’t exactly remember when I got bored of it, or when my curiosity was over. Today when I see myself, I don’t have that super power now. I am flowing with the ongoing invisible dimension of time to match its pace and that of the world around me which is expanded a lot since childhood. I don’t even know where that watch is. Perhaps, it is still sleeping inside that locker of my father's almirah, without making the ticking sound, waiting for its new worthy owner. The sad part is, now I really doubt that it would give me that super power, I used to have.

I wish I could control the flow of the time again.
I wish I could be that superhero again.

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