You know, a strange thought came to me while I was answering calls at work earlier today. Since it’s the Tuesday shift, it’s a given that there would be a lot of calls coming in, which that I was always looking forward for to when my break would start, if only to give my poor vocal chords a chance to rest. As such, I kept on looking at the online clock I had pulled up on my remote desktop… Which in turn reminded me of the wall clocks that, until recently, graced the walls of my room.
For years I had this big, wood-framed wall clock. A common joke in the family was that it was one of the first things ever bought by my parents when they got married, and that it’s actually older than I was. While it’s still functional, I had my father take it out of my room a few months ago because, frankly, the sound it made whenever its hands moved had become too loud for comfort. I was actually having difficulty sleeping (well, more than I usually did), since I could hear it over everything else in the room, like when the a/c was turned on full-blast.
However, since apparently my father thought that it wouldn’t be right for me to not have a timepiece in my room, he instead migrated the wall clock from my sister’s room over to mine. Unfortunately, that one was even worse than the previous wall clock, despite being much younger by comparison; the hand that counted off the seconds kept on ringing out with this annoying ‘clack, clack, clack’ that it was hard to concentrate on whatever it was I was doing, and doubly so when I tried to sleep.
And so, I took off the clock from the wall, and placed it outside of my room. Right on top of the shoe rack (filled to the brim with my sister’s shoes, I might add) that faced the door of my room, in fact.
However when I did that, my father just put in another wall clock in its place. But that one was also noisy as the others.
So I moved that one out of the room as well, this time putting it on too of the bookshelves that hung above the shoe racks. Two days later, my sister’s wall clock found its way into my room again. So as expected, I kicked it out of the room.
All this shuffling of wall clocks continued for several weeks, until finally my father seemed to have conceded defeat in a way. I say in a way, since he still bought a new wall clock for my room (and its hanging right now in place just beside my doorway), except this time he had the right sense to buy one whose hand movements were mostly quiet.
Most of the time, I barely even notice that this most recent clock is even in my room, since it’s so quiet. Which is why it’s so unnerving sometimes when I can suddenly hear the movement of its hands over everything else. It’s happened only a few times so far — the most recent case was during the spat of rains that pretty much flooded the capital a week or so ago — but it’s kind of disturbing all the same.
Maybe I just didn’t have anything to focus my attention on during the time? Could be.
