I go about my day—all twenty minutes of it—as I do other days. I contemplate the state of the world, mine in particular, smoke a couple, hit a couple and then end my day.

I begin the next day by closing my eyes in time to begin the next. And after that my day stretches to exactly twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes. There’s a lot to do; buy groceries, cook food, clean the space I call home, wash the dishes, water the plants, change the sheets, take a shower, wear clean clothes, stare out into the world with longing, read something (anything!), get milk, make tea, answer the neighbors’ numerous annoying questions, nap for just about forty-five minutes (in which the world awakes and brings you out of slumber), wake up all groggy and contemplate what to do next, cook more food, eat it, peek into the lives of those you may know or had known, wash the dishes in the sink, wash your face, wash your skin, wash your teeth, wash your veins, turn the lights off.

The day after lasts about a minute. The one after that about all of seventeen seconds. I wonder if you’ve caught on to the workings of my inner world. Whether it is so in reality or not does not bother me. It is certainly so in my reality. The only one that matters. So now that you know about this fun little fact, what do you think of me? Am I an object of fascination, a thing to be marveled at? Or do I confuse and irritate you? Do I remind you of the many insolents who defy the ‘normal’ working order of this world of ours? Doesn’t matter, judgment will be passed either way.

“How goes the lonely old sages that roam the coast,” I wonder, and I shout. Though none hear me. The wind has carried my voice, though I am pretty sure that instead of carrying it towards it has carried my voice away from the sages it was meant for. This is my favorite thing to do—sit next to the sea, observe and sometimes shout out sentences and questions. Today this is all I do.

I am not bound by the ordinary confines of time. I am not bound by ‘appropriate’ times to wake up, eat, sleep, drink, think, talk, repeat. I make my own rules, just as I have made my own time. I haven’t physically created it, no. But I have tweaked the rules around to suit me. All these regulations and rules about time, day, night, etc. were made up by someone. And if they can be made, they can certainly be unmade. I haven’t unmade it really, just rearranged it.

My time on this earth began the day I had my first thought. Before that all time ceased to exist. And I thought: “Could it be that I could make my own place in this world?” And then after I seemed to grow by many months before my next thought: “How much longer will this linger inside me?”

This thing, this entity that gripped me in its sharp, tight claws. This thing that is now a part of me, a moving, breathing, active thing. This thing I dare not name. This thing that I am as attached to as it is to me. If it stops lingering, I will end. There won’t be much else to hang on to. Can I take it out and place it somewhere? A prize trophy that I can just stare at, stroke at moments when it all gets too much, a solid reminder of it still being in my life. I fear if it slips away I will not realize it, I will live in hollow, barren ground without it.

The only reference point I live by is time. The minutes, seconds, hours that make up my day. Weeks, days and years are of no consequence to me. I am told we live in the year 2025. I am also told we live in the year 1447. I am sure many others have ways of measuring time. I simply do not care.

In the thirty-two hours that make up my day, I am driven from branch to branch of a dinosaur of a bank. Neither know what to do about my application or my papers. They both tell me to try the other. Each branch has its own quirks, and each branch has a minimum waiting time of three uncles there for an argument, not their money. I am spent to the edge of my sanity. I am overstimulated and alone and Oh God, It’s back again! And I keep a straight face as I head to the counter, explain myself the umpteenth time and am told once again to head to the branch I came from. I go home. I sit in silence.

The next day lasts about fifty-five minutes. It begins with a sip of tea; it ends with the cup shattering on my balcony.

The day after is four hours of contemplation. I can’t really say what I was thinking about; it’s all such a mishmash in my head. What happens in the brain should stay in the brain. At least that’s what I believe.

I hope you understand by now. I would caution you to not try to understand this peculiarity of mine with the constraints of your lives. I do not live by them, nor do I care for them. If you choose to do so, you will find yourself more perplexed than when you started. For your own good, it’s useless to even try. Differences are usually labelled. I am sure I will be too. Make your own theories about me, go on. Why else would I put myself out there?

One day—sixteen hours—the water ran out. A common problem. A fixable problem. But only if the stars align and the man with the tanker of water and a political song as his caller tune picks up. He does. He has none to offer today. I implore the neighbors, ask if I may borrow some water. They oblige. It is enough to wash my face and use sparsely in the toilet. The next day—ten hours—the man arrives. He fills my life with hope, just as he fills my tank with water. As he leaves I am renewed with a sense of purpose. I cook, I clean, I read, I watch, I scribble, I turn the house inside out. And then I sleep.

There are moments when this thing inside of me grips me like roots grip the ground. As though it uses me to grow into this massive, tentacle-like network. A tentacle gets activated each time I remember. And depending on the intensity of the thing I remember, the tentacle either beats to the intensity of the pain or it triggers the many many tentacles inside me, and they all beat as one. Sometimes a tentacle will lodge itself in my throat, sometimes in my eyes, sometimes in my stomach. At all times I am overcome by it. There is little for me to do than to feel it, fully, wholly, as intensely as I can. This tentacle will not stay inside me. I cannot make it. Sometimes I really wish I could, I wish I could control it. I wish there was a switch, a controller, anything. Instead I lay here, drowning into myself. Some nights I feel the tentacles wrapping and squeezing me from the inside out. Some nights I want them to wrap themselves around me. Call it a false sense of safety if you will. Some days I am left motionless. This thing that grows and keeps growing, this ball in the middle of my chest.

A day—five minutes—that feels like eternity stretching out onto the horizon. Horizons have always been fascinating to me. Where the earth and the sky meet, where the world was once thought to end. But that ending stretches, elongates, endures beyond our imagination. To reach that end, that line, and see what lies smack in the middle of it, we’d have to invent something. An invention to cover up another invention. That day I invented a way to cover up my days.

The thing—the creature, the tentacle, the monster, the butterfly, my solemn companion. I try to forget, to not remember and bring more aches. I try to do it all and yet the thing has its own way of making its presence known. Very subtle on its quiet days, right beneath the beat of my own heart, a throbbing so slight not even my body can feel it. A throb that has existed since the first day I remember.

Ten hours of swiping, scrolling, watching, ducking buses, rickshaws and bikes. Ten hours of being very aware of the fragility of our lives. Ten hours of looking at a dead body, at a decomposing face. I wasn’t standing next to a dead body for ten hours, no. But a glance at it was enough. The rest of my day was spent wondering at a life lost, a life that was possibly as ordinary as one could have. That face roamed in my mind, round and round and round, always coming back to it. Straying far from the face was never an option. It existed in tandem with the thing, the throb. That day was particularly challenging; the thing would tingle each time the face would take a front seat in my brain. A tingle that activated all the various tentacles lodged throughout my body, one singular tingle that made my muscles, veins and skin ache and itch. I went through the motions of being an ordinary being when out in public. At home I dropped down and tried to fix whatever was happening inside with the coolness of the stone floor. I rolled and wriggled and slid like a snake. I rubbed my body against the floor, laying myself as flat as I could. I took a cold shower, I turned on the air conditioning and I tried to stick my entire body inside the refrigerator. It was only when I was exhausted, panting, pleading, skin red, blue and raw, covered in dust and lint, that I passed out.

Some days I wonder about the thing I am not supposed to think about. The thing, that is. The thing is that the thing itself isn’t the problem. The thing is a thing is a thing, it has no name, no identity, no importance save for whatever I choose to give it. The thing is just that, a thing. I wonder if I just stopped referring to it, if I just refused to acknowledge its presence if it would somehow just fade away. The thing that was born with me, in me, the thing that I dare not name, the thing that at times feels like a friend, an enemy, a companion, a soulmate. The thing is of course its own thing, it is not mine. It is not mine, it is not mine, it is not mine.

It is mine. It always has been, it always will be.

Most days pass by in a blur. I don’t remember much, nothing exciting happens. What good is remembering, then? But I must remember, I must. I can’t remember why I need to do so, but I must. Once I spent the entire day making lists of things I saw, people I spoke with, to-do lists, this list, that list. That day was also incredibly long, forty hours and thirteen minutes long. A lot happened then. A lot happened that I have documented although I cannot make sense of it somehow. Those lists were unintelligible, scribbles on pieces of scrap. I must remember to remember by not making lists. I must remember to remember by devising another way. I must remember to devise this way.

On a cool winter’s morning, a day when the world was asleep and I was awake, I could feel for the first time in a long time a sense of calm. I was never a calm person, I was very quick to jump to conclusions, shortheaded, quick to joy, quick to grief. I was only calm in retrospect. It felt like a new beginning. The thing hadn’t vanished but it had stayed in the back, deep, deep in my subconscious. I felt as though I had more energy, a life renewed. I had interests, hobbies, work, people to meet and things to see. And while I was doing it all, I had the peculiar sense that for the first time in a long while I could trace back to a moment hours ago in the day and recall it with great clarity. For most of my life such moments have been fuzzy, outlined like the halo around light. When the day had ended, fifteen hours and three minutes later, I did not feel overstimulated or anxious. I was simply tired. The simple tired that signals the fact that the body is ready to take a break, nothing more. This break that made me forget about the thing was also quite peaceful. My mind was a vacuum, a plain (a plane) canvas, a flatland that stretched beyond recognition.

That didn’t last long. A few days went by, of varying lengths, where I felt as though I was walking on a cloud, that there was nothing more to life than its mundanity. And those days ended and my world became the same again. For a while it oscillated that way, between mundanity and total anxiety. And then it became a mishmash of the two. Such that I never knew where I would end up at the beginning of a day. The thing was moving along with it, I believe it also didn’t know how to behave. We were each finding out as we went along, as each day brought out new feelings and reactions. The thing wasn’t an all-consuming force by this point, it was there in the back, making itself known at times and obscure at others. We spent a total of one thousand four hundred and eighty-nine hours in this in-between.

At the one thousand four hundred and ninetieth mark, I accepted. I accepted the varying nature of my disposition. I accepted that my world view could change after having lived all my life in it. And it was as if I was birthed anew. The thing was a part of me, I was a part of it. We relied on each other, dependent like breath is to air.

There was a time when I lived. I lived like each day was my last, I made memories, made food, made friends, made a carpet once, made a shelf, made sweets, made napkins, made a fortune. I can’t remember if that was all in the same life or if I’m thinking of other lives. At some point I did all of the above. At some point I stopped doing all of the above. At this point I am a shell of my former self, but I am not unhappy. I’ve heard that often: people being referred to as shells which equals unhappiness. I am a shell because I have left my former self behind, I am a shell because I chose to be one. My happiness is not relevant here.

The thing seems closer to my happiness than all my past lives. The thing claws on to the thing that makes the thing throb. Once it lets go the thing gets space to breathe and the thing is once more dormant. This is an emotion one should feel. This is an emotion one should feel in abundance. I have lived so long with the thing attached to the thing that to not feel an emotion others expect of me is ordinary. I am apathetic towards everything my body is unable to do because I simply do not feel the need to care.

A day, a second day, a third, a fourth. A week, a month, a year. Time goes by in numbers, sure, measurable, exact, constant. Exactly what I hate. In a year’s time—my version of three hundred and sixty-five days—I have come to think of the thing as an extension of my left lung. It stays right there, not moving around much like it used to. And each time it needs to make its presence known the thing constricts, writhes, slides around. I never have to look farther than my own beating heart.

I am in my own little alcove, one of my choosing. I have created the circumstances necessary for myself to remain permanently enclosed in this vast grey space. The thing stays with me, of course it must. It had created this alcove, a space where only we exist. Sometimes I wonder if the thing is well and truly obsessed with me. Am I obsessed with it? Why do I keep it around? I have tried to expel it from my being, tried to shoo it away. Either it doesn’t listen, or I need to do more than just talk to it. I do that too, sometimes on the shorter days I will speak to the thing as a friend. I seldom get an answer but that doesn’t deter me. The thing is my companion and I am its. This alcove, though quite big, is perfect for the both of us.

On a day that was particularly gloomy and dark—unlike the usual—everyone decided to stay in. I know this because I saw more cars parked downstairs, more people flitting about the grounds and stairs, more noises from outside. They tell me it’s unsafe to go out when the weather turns stormy, a drop of rain would upend the city. I can agree with that, but I have never had cause to step out much and so I cannot understand why. And then the rains started; children screamed in joy, the backup generator turned on, a pipe burst open, a car broke down and afar I could see the beginnings of a traffic jam. That day was exactly three hours and forty-five minutes long. I spent it watching the world disintegrate.

Even if I don’t remember, the thing does. I think. It remembers why it is a part of me, I do not. All our lives are spent remembering, tapping into memories, keeping the past alive. All of life is an act of remembrance, of holding on to memories, silences, faces, feelings. All of life is holding the wound of time with grace, mourning it, nurturing it, remembering, trying to not let it fade from memory or body. I may have let it fade from memory but with the thing present, it will not fade from my body.

At the last hour of my day—the fourth—I decide to extract the thing. I don’t have a plan as such, just a will, a need. I take both hands to my chest, try to hold onto anything (my kameez) and pull it from my body. All that does is stretch the cloth out. I put more force into it, pull harder. The fabric rips. I place my hands on skin, where the fabric has left a hole, and pull. I pull until there is blood dripping from my chest, skin scratched and maimed. I stop when I get tired. I vow to try again, and again.

And each time I do I am left with nothing but scars, gashes, bruises. A searing pain has made its way on me since that first day. It stays, like film on still water, until I stop. The coolness of the morning after I stop trying to extract my lungs feels like I have woken up after a long, dreamless sleep. Could I try from the back? But I would require assistance for that. No one I knew would be willing to be a part of this experiment. I could just let the thing be, as I have for so long. But the need to remove it from my being is so strong I have to try. So, I rip my clothes from the back as well but can’t get a hold of my skin or get a good enough angle to even make a dent. Beyond careless scratches I don’t get much farther. I fall into a heap of my selves, too exhausted to pick up the pieces.

There isn’t much time left. I may have lived for as long as I did but I can live no longer. Soon a self of me will not exist. A version that existed before I wrote this sentence. After I write the next it will vaporize.

The thing is, I don’t mind the thing being around so long as it can behave itself. It tends not to. When my day began three minutes ago, I noticed marks on my chest and back. I’m not sure where they could have come from, but I suspect the thing may have something to do with it. I’ll have to make a trip to the pharmacy, there’s quite a lot of bandaging up that needs to be done.

We now live as one. The thing and my selves. In me there are multitudes. Outside of me there is only one certainty.