Allegrophobia

I was late. Positively late, and the typical Pavlovian response of mine was to panic. It’s called allegrophobia. My heart starts racing, blood rushing, eyebrows knitting, wrist-raising every few seconds to the eye level to catch a glimpse of the time. Only to realize I didn’t bring a watch – which is not atypical of me. Forgetfulness is my middle name. My eyes darted around in search for watch somewhere on the train, received only by freely hanging wrists adorned with wristbands and trinkets, no watches. I guess people increasingly choose to live in a timeless world where mad rushes and pandemonium is accompanied by a refusal to acknowledge the chariot of time. Or maybe phones have taken over the function of telling time. Poor old grandfather clocks – ever so stoic and consistent yet now shed their previous status as a necessity.

My mind wandered aimlessly while another part of it calculated every minute and second that whizzed by and imagined arresting time, putting it on a leash and freezing it with dry ice. Then kill it. Before it kills me, at least.

There’s this horrifying story by Roald Dahl whom I read a lot as a child and got all freaked out but insisted on reading (what a masochist). It was an awful, awful story, that story – The Way Up to Heaven was it, and that was the story that turned me into a goose at the end of it, oh all those goosebumps! Mrs Forster had a pathological fear of being late, missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. She would risk everything to be punctual – and I fathom she would jump off the cliff when the clock strikes twelve on 14 mar night if a death’s train to hell too.

So Mrs Forster was planning to fly to visit her daughter; terrified that she would miss her flight she departed early, only to find her flight delayed till the following day when she arrived. She returned home and spent the night there. And I’ll leave Wikipedia to tell you the rest of the story:

The following morning as Mrs. Foster prepares to take her car to the airport,
her husband announces that he should be dropped off at the club on the way,
which terrifies her, it being somewhat out-of-the-way. Before they leave, he
pretends to have forgotten a present he had intended for their daughter Ellen,
and to Mrs. Foster's dismay he ventures into the house in search of it. As she
grows increasingly impatient whilst waiting in the car, she notices the present
hiding in the crack of the seat where her husband had been sitting and "couldn't
help noticing that it was wedged down firm and deep, as though with the help of
a pushing hand ", and tells the chauffeur to call him down. He tries to enter
and notices the door is locked. She decides to go herself, but then, with the
key in the door she suddenly freezes, as if listening intently. After a few
seconds, she returns to the car, says there is no time, and is driven off to the
airport. She makes her flight with a few minutes to spare. Things go well in
Paris, and she writes her husband each Tuesday. When she returns to Idlewild
Airport she is mildly interested to find her husband has not sent a car to meet
her, but she gets into a taxi and arrives home. She sees the mail has built up,
and smells a peculiar odour. Noticing that the elevator is not in order, she
calmly dials for a repairman and waits at her husband's desk for his arrival.

So Mr Forster was condemned to death. The terrifying thought? Mrs Forster heard her screams for help before she left for the airport and had decided to ignore them. Call it allegrophobia, call it evil, call it devillish.

And there I was, so positively late. Mind wandering to a world with teleports – so we have no buses elevators down, no flight delays, no oh-it-was-raining-and-I-couldn’t-get-a-freakin’-cab, no excuses of being late. Damn, what a wonderful world that would be. The way up to heaven would have been less painful, for poor Mr Forster at least.