The Monochrome Chronicle

01 | 03.10 AM

                 

01 | 03.10 AM

I pyshically wake up, gasping for air.

Heart pounding.

Shocked with fear.

Unable to scream.

Sweat is everywhere, covers my whole skin.

It was not a sort of sleep paralysis that I experienced. I am unable to scream, but I am able to move. My body feels heavy, but moving parts of me is an easy thing. I swipe the blanket off of me and lean aside to turn on the light, then rise up after adjusting my eyes to the new brightness.

Alone, in a Tuesday morning, I walk down the stairs and head off straight to the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as I can to prevent Aunt Rika from waking up. She came home in a late night yesterday, so I know that she must be very tired.

I pull out a glass from the cabinet and place it under the stream of tap water, drinking it like a thirsty donkey then. Then I sit in the dining room. Staring at nothing. Not even bothered to check my alarm clock, it gets more useless and useless everyday. When it rings, I'm already on my way to the bathroom. I don't know why I don't turn it off, since I always get up before dawn. Well, maybe because everyday I hope that I'll get my sleeping schedule back—or everyone's sleeping schedule—that it will ring to wake its owner up.

I miss my sleeping schedule.

I miss my parents.

I miss sleeping with my parents.

I miss sleeping with my parents, when suddenly there was an explosion from the back side of my house, near the barn full of fodder, which then ignited the entire house, and I did nothing but crying and staying right where I was until a camper saved my life, only to find both of my parents were burnt in the bloodthirsty fire.

The morning after, I dressed in all black for their funerals. And the night after it, that's when I started to dream about my future. I dreamed about me going to a new school that teaches both French and Greek, and Aunt Rika enrolled me to River Fork Elementary. I dreamed about me falling from a bike, and I fell from my cousin's bike the afternoon after it.

Now it's eight minutes away from 3.10AM. Means that I've been awake for eight minutes. The clock somehow feels so sluggish to hit 6, and it not usually happens the days before. Now I'm feeling like I fall into an endless boredom, knowing none to do.

So I decide to get back to my room. Not to have some additional sleeping hours, but to contact Flint. Surprisingly, he answers my call.

"I knew you would call, Wine," he says.

"That was such a quick pick up in the morning like this." I climb up the bed and crawl inside the blanket, shaping myself exactly like a cat in a cold, rainy weather. "What are you up to? Do I interrupt your sleep?"

"Not at all," he sighs, "the stomachache made me up and now I have to go to the bathroom."

The image of him running to the bathroom in the dark haunts me, and also the way he grabs his phone and brings it together with him in a flash. "Don't tell me you're still in the bathroom now."

"I'm still in the bathroom now."

"Oh," I pause, kinda amused. "I hope it's not disposing your golds that you're doing."

"I am disposing my golds."

"Wow," I respond immediately.

"What was your wow for? At least I'm doing the right thing, you know you can't do that at school when you have a series of daily tests, and today I'm going to be in the classes of devils who really love to make their students suffering by simply looking at their questions," he says in an energic tone, while I'm always using my lazy tone, the uninterested-sounded one.