text: I look up, a break from staring at the same old blank page on my notebook. It would scream at me if it could, only because it had watched me stare at it aimlessly for a few weeks now. I let my eyes wander a bit - I do that quite often, and you know, the reason is quite extraordinary. They catch the wildest of things when you just let them be. Imagine, you, this very second, while you are reading this so-far-pretty-pointless paragraph, are blindfolded and tied. Just suddenly, blindfolded and the kind that doesn’t let light seep through. The utter black and nothing but black blindfolded - I think you get the point. So now you, my borrowed protagonist, can see nothing but darkness but you can feel your body being pushed into a small space, maybe a car trunk or the floor under a backseat? You don’t know, but it’s pleasant, of course. The car makes sharp turns, makes sense because you’re abducted. You can smell something horrible enough to trigger a gag reflex resting against your slammed face - soft and smelly - but your wildest guesses as to what that is will remain unverified, for obvious reasons. Every turn that you take, you are yearning to see it, every little movement around you, every weak sound is tickling your imagination and you can’t help but crave to see it. This happens for a while before you are made to sit on a metal surface, and the blindfold is taken off. Now you would think, what kind of a maniac would not be freaking out in this situation, and rather be thinking about how to look around after a while of being blindfolded - but it’s a story, we are not open for discussion. I am just telling you how you are feeling, and you are to play your part. You take a moment and then open your eyes. Your eyes take a stroll of the setting. Now that, that walk, which is part sheer happiness of having the power to see the world around you and part panic that is making you scrutinise all that surrounds you - that is the stroll I ask my eyes to take. It’s not a cakewalk, so the story and setting are essential, don’t frown. Now we know how to do it, so we can go ahead and look around the room. There really wasn’t anything extraordinary, it was a plain white desk, not one scribble that I hadn’t seen before. A bottle of water - we should have a sip perhaps, and keep going. A bag that’s half open, pinned down with the weight of things we can’t see and a notebook peeping from the inside. And yes, a peripheral of people populating the room. Not a crowd, but honestly, we would prefer less right? Now this doesn’t feel so exciting as I had built it up to be so we no longer walk, we start moving faster. More things that we know aren’t it - the ‘It’ we are looking for. More garbage, simple drab objects that I know all about already, nothing is really fascinating here. What an immense waste of time and imagination this is turning out to be - the setting exercise turned out to be pretty useless, too. Nothing, just garbage. I think it’s safe to say we should return back to the blank page, this seems pointless. And right then, right when I, or should I say we, were up on the inexplicable brilliance of this stroll, it happened. Now you don’t want another long analogy of how quickly it happened, I know that too. So, imagine it to be a second and half - that will do. I locked my eyes, the ones I had set free to roam around and pick things and bring them back to me, they stayed put for one and a half second. I had seen him before. A million times would be a hyperbole, but yes, I had seen him before. But for one and a half second, I looked at him. I looked at him while he looked at me, and I realised how deceptive is the concept of time. How can I feel my blood rush to my face, while my heart suddenly decides to skip a beat and breath is a forgotten concept over all. Now all that was physically happening inside me, I gave away with the pink on my face, and he is still looking right here - and say a second still remains somehow. I scrutinise his face, a similar tint of red I was wearing, looking at me as if I caught him off-guard. I stabilise a bit, I can act like it was a mistake, I have the window. But I couldn’t. Because I wouldn’t breathe, unless he looked away. I wouldn’t lose the hint of blood from my face, unless he looked away. I wouldn’t remember a thing but this for a lifetime to come, unless he looked away. It was like we were caught red-handed in the middle of a crime so brazen that I wanted we knew we had to run away. I panicked and took my eyes off him - forced the time to move. That’s how weird time is, it felt like hours passed in those five minutes, and nothing seemed the same - the things around me didn’t seem like waste of matter anymore.