There is an old clock in the centre of the empty square, hands stuttering forward without meaning, ticking not with time but with memory. It leans into the sky like a question half swallowed, rust running along its sides like veins where once certainty must have lived.
You watch it sometimes when you pass by, pretending you have somewhere to be, pretending you do not notice the way its face never quite looks back.
The clock keeps moving, but it never arrives. You feel it too in your chest, that pull toward something not ahead but somewhere sideways, a place you cannot walk to because the streets have folded themselves into paper and the maps are drawn in invisible ink.
It is not a house you miss. Not walls or windows. It is a morning with laughter that no longer fits into your mouth. It is a version of yourself who still believed the story was only beginning.
You stand there longer than you mean to, the cold biting through your sleeves, and you realise you are not waiting for someone. You are waiting for a crack in the hour, a tear in the minute, a chance to slip back into a moment that no longer has a name.
Homesick for something that breathes only inside the tick of a broken clock, where the past leans in so close you can almost touch it, but you never will.
And still you wait.
Aaditya Bajpai 