“the clockmaker’s orphan”
they say time is a straight line. they lied. i was born in a room that smelled of burnt parchment and unfinished poems- a place where memories walked backwards and futures hid beneath the floorboards. my name? irrelevant. names are labels we cling to when the soul is already falling apart. i was once a girl who wished for an elder brother, who stitched metaphors into midnight rain, who loved letters more than lovers, who called silence her inheritance and love her most distant, exiled planet. in the 12th year of my existence, i met an old man with keys for fingers and a clock embedded in his chest. he said he was time’s orphan. he offered me a deal. “would you write for a hundred years, if it meant you could rewrite just one moment?” i said yes. not because i was brave, but because the past had already swallowed me whole and the future hadn’t invited me in. he gave me no machine - no gears, no glowing blue mist only a quill, and a warning: “write. but beware, each word will take you closer to the moment you dread most.” and so i wrote for a hundred years. i wrote of chai after dance practice, burnt cookies and broken plates, truth-or-dare dares in dusty libraries and the ache of being the outsider even in your own poem. i inked sorrow in every dialect- hometown rains, hostel whispers, unreciprocated love dressed as cosmic punishment. each story i stitched bled into the next. i watched her fall for him a thousand times. i watched her gift her silence to him, again and again as if love was a riddle only pain could solve. but time? time is crueler than destiny. because when i finally reached the moment I wished to rewrite- he was gone. the old man. the orphan of time. and i understood: you don’t time-travel with machines. you travel by remembering, over and over, until it breaks you. time did not let me change a thing but it made me write until i became the memory itself. i am no longer the girl who once existed. i am her echo, living in borrowed paragraphs, etched in the margins of books you will never finish. this is my century-long confession. not of travel but of return. and the unbearable act of staying. somewhere in the space between midnight rain and handmade gifts is a girl, still writing.