The Brown Caterpillar in my room
The morning when the dawning ray entered the cracks of the white window I had this sudden urge to get up. I am not an early bird. I relate more to the instantly recognized bird with a round head and huge, forward-facing eyes; Owl. My purple curtains were flapping and it looked as if it was going to rain heavily. There was no sound of thunder nor the flashes of light but a cold breeze of air to tell me. To tell me, about the rain that will soon be pouring in my backyard which will also get the car that I had parked in front of my house.
When I got up to check the curtains, I saw a caterpillar. It was brown, with little black compound eyes and a zillion of tiny hairs. I could sense the feeling of “want to survive the rain” in his crawling. It filled me with an immense sense of responsibility when the thought about him choosing my house as his home to survive rushed into my brain.
I wanted to lift that tiny creature, but his intimating bushy hairs made me not to. So I went inside, brought a white paper with sharp edges that gave me paper cut once. After a little struggle, the caterpillar had made it to the paper. I kept in on my study table and went straight to my phone to google what am I supposed to prepare as breakfast to the unapologetically uninvited guest. I found out they love munching on leaves, the mulberry leaves. I didn’t have it. I went to my kitchen garden, picked up a leaf, a general one. I gave my puppy face look (which is my all-time weapon )to the caterpillar luring him to take at least a bite. He didn’t. He didn’t care about my hospitality, just stubborn enough to ask for Mulberry.
I wanted to have my mulberry leaves now. As I have survived most of my morning in life on Coffee, to no surprise it was my Mulberry leaves. So I went to the kitchen, which was big enough for one person. A person who rarely gets to cook anything at home and has a redundantly monotonous life. Travels in a metro every day, the same metro with the same people who looked equally dissatisfied with life choices. I made my coffee. A coffee with very little sugar cubes and no milk, just a few (ml) of hot water to make it dissolve those brown dust of coffee. I always drink the same drink, the same amount of dilution but it always feels like a fresh new start. I think I too have made my systems stubborn like the little boneless brown caterpillar.
OH, SHOOT! My Caterpillar. My guest. I took those 20 steps hurried and worried. I went inside my room, my eyes searching for the table. I could see the paper from my door and when I went near it, I couldn’t find my caterpillar, any caterpillar. Had it gone? It hadn’t rained but the wind was still the same, the same prediction about the rain. I was worried, about the Caterpillar. I searched it inside the room, outside the same window but clueless.
While in the act, my eyes caught the back of the brown cupboard in the room, where my mom had made sure to paste a lot of motivational quotes during her last visit. One of them with a picture of the rising sun on it said “Early bird catches the worm”. The worm, my caterpillar. Early-bird was me I suppose. This morning I was no longer an owl to myself, I was an early bird who caught the worm, welcomed him, and then somehow lost it. I looked outside the window, it was morning. There was no rain. There was no blowing wind. There was no Brown Caterpillar.
