The Clock

Nature's artistic shapes happen on my fruit platter! Photo by Tameshk.

My sons went to bed early tonight. The house is quiet and I can hear the appliances and clocks humming and ticking, noises normally lost in the active and awake household.

There is a digital clock in my house which has been locked up in a far drawer somewhere, deliberately making it hard for me to hear it. I have hidden this clock, because I don't have the heart to throw it away yet, and can't bear to have it around, either. This is a clock that sat on my desk at work in Tehran. It is still running on Tehran time because I never figured out how to operate it properly. When I first arrived in California from Tehran a couple of years ago, the clock was still where I could hear it chime once every hour, and 24 times at midnight, Tehran time, which was around noon local time. I remember everytime it chimed, I would think of Tehran and a memory I had left in it. When it chimed 24 times at Tehran midnight time, I would be filled with sad feelings about something deeply personal and painful. Before I found a job, it was a perfectly routine thing in my day to be crying at that same time almost everyday. When I moved into my new house, some things, pictures, mementoes, and that clock, were all moved into a spot where they could not be seen, heard, or touched again. In certain spots of my house, however, I can still hear the clock chime on the hour sometimes. I'm just hoping that the battery would run out one of these days, so that the clock, too, would become quiet like my heart finally did.