The Epiphany

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The fingers holding the pencil scribbled frantically on the blank sheet; the eyes stared intensely, trying to figure out what it could be, while the body continued to transform from a state of tension to relaxation intermittently, unable to decide on which way to go.
The slanting, straight and curvy lines crowding the white sheet of paper soon begin to take shape as the sparkle in the eyes reflected his excitement, with the mind now finally able to get closer to what it had been striving for.
The unconscious nod of the head as he drew showed his satisfaction with the progress and as he continued, the hands suddenly stopped as everything came to a grinding halt.
The mind felt as if it had entered a pitch-dark room, darker than ever and blacker than the blackest thing’s eyes had seen till now; the event was so sudden; he felt his pupils constricted, disabling them for a moment.
The fingers had stopped moving while he gaped at the sheet with stony eyes, the mind as numb as dead, offering nothing on what his body should do.
At first, there was a lack of acceptance of what had just occurred and then, when the mind gradually started to regain a sense of reality, he did nothing other than offering a smirk, directed at his self which strangely felt detached and unresponsive.
‘What has happened to me,’ the internal dialogue finally started, even though the fingers were still frozen, the tip of the pencil piercing the paper making a small dark hole where it overstayed its welcome.
‘Think, think, think,’ he tried convincing himself, blissfully unaware, it was his mind which was giving these directions, but the complex interplay of emotions and logic turned everything on its head as even the thought of reinvigorating the mind was coming from the mind itself and the words were starting to lose their relevance.
The eyes now began to move across the room, spotting a large cobweb, with the spider moving like an Army General, probing every part of the web and making sure it’s sturdy enough to catch hold of the unsuspecting fly or an insect.
His saliva constantly turning into the thread and helping him build a tool to satiate his hunger while continuing to expand its reach as far as it can.
‘I need to remove those,’ he murmured to himself while thinking about where he might have kept the broom, but even after repeated tries, failed to recollect the last time he used it.
‘Last Diwali, before Ma came here, I cleaned the place,’ the thoughts quickly moved to a year ago as that was the only obvious memory he could recollect of using it.
The thoughts soon began to narrow down further, as he remembered using it once again when one of the glasses was broken, and even once more when he was forced to retrieve something from under the bed.
‘Yes, yes, it’s under the bed,’ the eyes sparkled as he shouted out aloud after that quick epiphanic recollection.
The body, however, remained immobile; the tip of the pencil continued penetrating the soft sheet of paper while the hands clasped it with a firm grip.
The feet finally but reluctantly moved from under the table, feeling for the slipper he was wearing but which now lay far away from where he was sitting. He realized it only after bending down to find it, after all the attempts to feel it with the feet had turned futile.
‘How the heck, it went so far up there,’ he murmured, unwilling to believe he was not wearing the footwear when he sat there.
‘First the broom and now these slippers,’ he muttered angrily to himself.
The sudden tension and stress agitated the mind further as he got into another confusion; ‘what will I do with the slippers?’
‘Remove the cobwebs, you fool,’ the reply hit his head instantly, even before the ‘slipper’ question could hit him hard.
‘And what about the other thing I was supposed to be looking for?’ his mind seemed even more puzzled now?
The feet suddenly froze as he wrestled with this new enquiry now.
‘This is making me crazy,’ he put his hands around his head as if about to pull all his hair away.
‘Calm down, calm down,’ a voice echoed somewhere; he was however was still struggling to find out why he was looking for something else other than his slippers now.
‘Let me take a nap,’ he decided and walked towards his bed, ignoring all the other decisions his mind was trying to make all this while.
Throwing his body on the thick mattress, he felt an instant bounce, and just as he was settling down, instinctively closed his eyes.
But suddenly the eyes opened up.
‘Yes, yes, that’s what I need to do,’ he suddenly shouted out aloud, as if explaining a complex equation to a retard after having exhausted almost every way to make him understand.
‘It has to be a railing, a steel bridge, bouncy, and should use the instability of the place to maintain its composure,’ he murmured as his fingers picked up the pencil again and began scribbling even more vociferously on the sheet, till now lying abandoned on the lonely table.
A fly suddenly got stuck on the cobweb.
The naked feet yearned for the slippers, which though lay comfortably in one corner of the room; the broom rested somewhere under the bed, hoping not to be found out.