The First Chapter

As the engine of a motorcycle is kicked into ignition, I hear it gasp loudly and repeatedly in loud “put put’s” trying to breathe in the sparks in order to get its motor into a mechanical rhythm. You can hear the rider negotiating with his machine to oblige by gently but increasingly testing its throttle. From behind me, I suddenly hear footsteps clamouring their way up the staircase of my apartment building. The short yet striking clap of each footstep indicates the climber is jumping his way up the flight of stairs, possibly skipping a stair as he rushes up.

From my bedroom window on the third floor, I can see the roofs of other buildings in the neighborhood. Behind their silhouette, an orange hue rises up from the horizon into the deep dark night sky. Then, occasionally as if only to break the stillness, a distant car passing by throws in light stenciled through my balcony railing into my room as rectilinear shapes which continuously morph as they quickly run across the walls and ceiling. I’ve kept the lights turned off in my room as I usually do whenever I sit or lie down to write on my laptop.  Basically then there’s just the light emitting out from my laptop screen with me staring right back at it. It’s blinding in this darkness, and when I look away from the screen it’s blindingly dark. However if I give my eyes a few moments to adjust, I can make out the brighter darks of the white walls from the darker darks of the doors, closets and chairs.

Cozily lying down on my bed, I notice how my hands and arms, which happen to be out of the blanket which covers the rest of my body, feel warmer than my toes buried deep into the fold of the warm cotton filled fabric, and colder still when I rub them together. And then there’s something odd about the silence. It rings into my ears. It rings the same way it has been ringing for over a decade now. I find it amusing because I only hear it when there’s nothing to hear. I once went to a doctor for it when it had becoming too annoying. After some tests he concluded it was psychological, nevertheless prescribed me medicines usually used for the treatment of vertigo. Many years on, I’ve come to passively ignore it now, but every now and then when its dark and silent and I’m wide awake, it gives me a bell, and more so in my left ear.

Then there are my thoughts. I can’t always think well enough to write well enough. I’ve tried randomly quite a number of times only to have regretted the attempt. It’s not so much about writers block as much as it is about a writers push. Many a times you need witnessed inspiration to act as a seed from which a derived idea will sprout out to see the light of day. Other times you need that dark empty nothingness to stare into, to be teased into trying something dramatic, and only to be further enticed by the bright white of an empty Word Document with constant back and forth glances into the darkness for imaginative visual references.

It’s amazing to notice the number of details you normally do away with yet, in my current state of writing, have helped me in realizing an appropriate way to start my text. It after all, is my sense of space, which is exactly what I want to carry forward.

Though I could only hear the actions of the motorcyclist, I could still deduce the mechanical detail of the struggle. Since I could notice the growth in the texture and amplitude of sound nearing my singular top floor apartment, I could very easily anticipate my main door being unlocked and opened by my housemate before the event actually took place.  Despite there being a blackout in my immediate vicinity, the hue across the skyline indicated that the outage isn’t widespread, and that most of the city enjoys what presently we Pakistani’s see as the rare luxury of electrification. More so the crystal glow of the shapes of light racing across my room points a finger towards a person who abuses his choice for luxury by installing HID head lights for his vehicle which to all encompassing commuters is an abomination during the night; Similar to how irritatingly impossible navigating my room without injury through complete darkness might have been if a contrast wasn’t created due to the reflection of a dim source of light off my white bedroom walls and not off wooden surfaces.

Alternatively, the fact that with a constant body temperature, my sense of warmth and coldness act inversely in corresponding environments could describe how apparent ideas could prove to be untrue, and how the apparent ringing I hear is actually bogus, proves that in the end, what we might sense isn’t always reality, so what should stop us from projecting our own hallucinations into the darkness, for us to visualize our dreams, even while we are awake.

No. I am not only looking for how the space around us affects our senses, but more so, I’d like to explore how our senses affect the reality of space we inhabit.