CHAOS THEORY (ON HIATUS)

I. SHE'S GONE

I turn onto my back to see a blinding ball of sunlight staring at me.

He doesn't like me. He glares at me and thinks "You're lazy. You never get up on time. You think you have no responsibilities."

He knows all my secrets too. He knows about my awful habit of passing out at around 11:00 PM, lights on, contact lenses in, clothes on, only to be woken up by my father at 3:00, telling me to hurry up and shower and go back to bed. Which I do. He knows my awful nail biting habit, as well as how badly I can procrastinate. He knows how when I'm writing a story I get too caught up in the prewrite that I get bored with the story when I actually start writing.

Yes, the sun really knows everything about me, because I have two windows right across from each other in my room; one facing exactly the east and the other facing exactly the west. I get to see the sun rise when I wake up, from my bed, and I get to see the sun set from the other side of my room, my special corner with comfy chairs, books, and electronics, where I usually study.

And the best part is, I can watch him rise over and over again.

Right now, the sun is almost halfway risen on the horizon. The sky has gone up in flames. Sky pink-blue, as my grandmother always called it. I look at my alarm clock on my nightstand. It reads 6:24.

Rewind.

Now, the sun is slowly creeping up towards the horizon. The sky is shifting from a dark navy blue to a pale pink-cerulean. I look at my alarm clock once more. It reads 6:02.

In case you haven't picked up on it by now, I can reverse time.

It sounds awful and corny whenever I say it out loud, or even think it, but there's no other way to say it.

I can reverse time.

It's nothing world changing. I can't go back, years, months, hell, I can barely go back an hour if I'm lucky.

It has been the driving force behind many popular stories as of recent, and there are already too many variations of this newly-created I can reverse time but not really trope.

I guess my "type" is that I can rewind the world around me but I, myself, don't rewind. I can't go back with the world around me.

So this means I could hypothetically use way too much of my extremely overpriced bubble bath and then rewind back to when it was sealed, or I could hypothetically sleep an extra hour, or I could hypothetically use it to get overpriced fair food for free.

Okay, okay, yes I do all of those things. But I don't abuse my power that badly.

I don't use it kill people with no consequences for me, I don't use it win the lottery, I don't use it to steal things from stores. I don't like to abuse it. I don't mess with fate.

I've been able to do this for as long as I've been conscious. I have very early memories of me expressing my power openly. When adults would dismiss it as me being an imaginative child, I realized this wasn't normal. Since then, I've taken my own vow of secrecy to never tell another living soul about this. To eternally live life with a secret no one would ever believe me about.

Well, I've broken that vow with one person.

My best friend, Amelia. She's the only person in the world who knows. I'm happy that someone else knows about it, and that she believes me.

I trust her with my life. We've been friends since basically birth and I don't know what I would do without her. I know she feels the same way about me and she is one of my few friends where our friendship isn't unbalanced. Both of us equally contribute to our friendship. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a friendship where I try so hard to make plans and hang out, but the other person just doesn't care. Or how many times I've met someone who was way too clingy, who was constantly blowing up my phone, and I just don't have the energy to deal with it.