Somethings are Meant to Be

Chapter-4

~Afra~

After checking on my parents to make sure they were safe, I retreated to my room and closed the door behind me, hoping that if something went wrong, nobody would notice. I took a deep breath, thinking about the countless hours of work and the trust my parents had placed in me, and then pressed the button on my device. I waited with bated breath, but nothing happened.

A wave of panic surged through me. "Wait, what's wrong?" I muttered, trying to access my phone, only to find it completely unresponsive.

"No, no, no, this can't be happening now!" I pleaded with the lifeless device, desperately pressing buttons and restarting it in a frantic effort to make it work again.

It was hard to believe that, after all the meticulous planning and dedication over the past two years, this machine had failed me so spectacularly. I felt a crushing sense of despair as I realized that all my hard work might have amounted to nothing. Tears stung my eyes as I faced the bleak reality—years of effort seemingly evaporating in an instant. A single tear slipped down my cheek, symbolizing the depth of my disappointment and the weight of my loss.

I raised my hand to wipe away my tears, and my gaze happened to fall on my watch. To my dismay, I saw that the time was frozen; the hands of the watch were completely still, not moving at all. The realization hit me with a jolt—just like the other clocks, my watch had also stopped functioning. It was as if time itself had come to a halt, mirroring the profound sense of stagnation and failure I was feeling inside.

"Did I somehow break the watch too?" I wondered, feeling puzzled. This whole situation was strange—my phone had suddenly malfunctioned, and now my watch, which had been fine moments ago, had also stopped working.

Curiously, I checked the clock on my study desk and was shocked to find it frozen at a specific time. When I compared it to my watch, I saw they both displayed the exact same time. It seemed that time had stopped for both devices at precisely the same moment.

As I was attempting to make sense of the surreal situation, my phone suddenly began to heat up significantly. The intense warmth drew my attention to the device in my hand, and I noticed it was displaying numbers and a program detecting some kind of anomaly. The combination of the burning sensation and the unusual data on the screen added another layer of confusion to an already disorienting experience.

I glanced at my watch and was shocked to see the hands moving backwards. I quickly turned my gaze to the table clock, only to find it behaving the same way. The sight was both bewildering and terrifying. I tried to process what was happening—were the clocks malfunctioning, or was this supposed to happen?

I glanced at my phone, which had started beeping urgently, and saw a countdown timer ticking away. "5... 4... 3... 2... 1..." The numbers raced towards zero, and then, in an instant, everything went black.