As a boy, I was called Cosmo. Cosmo lived in a town called Orlo. It was night in Orlo at the starting point of Cosmo's story, the night cast pitch-black by the storm clouds covering the moon and the stars. Every now and again, the clouds would send down a bolt of forked lightning and illuminate the overcast sky with their electric light.
Cosmo, however, was deaf to the thunderous booms outside. He lay on his bed wrestling with his sheets, trapped in the claws of a vicious nightmare. Beneath his closed eyelids, he was falling, falling through space, watching the stars fly upwards as he fell down. He felt the screams being torn from his mouth by the endless vacuum around him. He does not die, but he almost wishes that he would. Then, as if the lightning from outside had passed through the boundary that kept his dream from real life, an electric bolt burst through his spine. Colored lights flashed before his eyes. Then, his eyes flew open. He felt beneath him and found that he was lying on his bed, and awake. At least, he hoped he was awake.
He sat up in his bed, breathing still heavy, his body drenched in cold sweat. He shook his head, attempting to clear the terrifying nightmare from his mind, and groped outwards with his hand until they met his glasses on his bedside table. He grabbed them, and slid them up his nose, blinked twice, then proceeded to look around to confirm his surroundings.
First, immediately to his right was his bedside table. On it were his glasses case, a few stacked books, and an alarm clock reading 6:28. He looked up and saw the ceiling fan, turned off in the cool of the night. Looking downwards from that, he saw the walls, lined with bookshelves, which were in turn stuffed with an almost unrealistic amount of books. ENcyclopedias, dictionaries, nonfiction, fiction, and a multitude of others filled the wooden shelves. Cosmo then turned his head to the right, stopped. Then shook his head.
"My sense must still be clouded from the dream. Just being able to feel the bed underneath me should have been enough to perceive that I was awake." Cosmo said. He shook his head once more to clear his thoughts, pressed a button on his alarm clock to disable his wake-up alarm that would go off in an hour, then pulled himself out of bed and left his room.
* * *
One thing you may have noticed about Cosmo is that he had a very limited range of emotion, which hopefully you find as depressing as I do. For example, when most people pick up a book, they feel an emotion of some sort, be it positive or negative. Cosmo, however, who in fact liked books quite a bit, when he sat down in his chair and picked up a new book, he felt excitement for only a second or two, but then nothing more.
Cosmo opened the book and skimmed the table of contents.
"A mere 300 pages?" he said incredulously. "With 45 minutes until breakfast until breakfast, I'll be nearly done." Cosmo riffled through the pages to the start of the book and began reading. Or at least, he tried to read. He absorbed the first paragraph rapidly, but as he moved on to the next paragraph, he found that he had absorbed none of the first. He reread it, but to no avail. Well, I guess I'm still a bit rattled from the nightmare, Cosmo thought. I guess I'll just sit here and clear my head a bit. After all, I do have a whole 45 minutes.
Cosmo set down his book, folded his hands, and began to think. I wonder what other children my age are doing right now. Well, probably sleeping. I doubt very many other high-schoolers awaken prior to noon, much less at six thirty. Then again, I did awaken an hour early due to that wretched nightmare. But what about the children that are awake? He pondered this for a moment. Most likely spending time with friends. I don't have too many friends, do I? Just Trevor, and I can only talk to him through video chat. Ah well. I'm never bored, between reading, local trading card tournaments, and helping Dad with his job at the college. After all, what's the point of friends besides entertainment? Then, almost in rebuttal, another question popped into his head: What's the point of my life? Cosmo shifted in his chair, almost startled by the unexpectedness of the question and also by its blunt meaningfulness. Well, let me think, he thought, and did.
He thought about what he wanted to do in life, what he wanted to see accomplished, and most of all, what the things he did now would lead him too. He thought and thought, but could not find an answer to that question. He was certain he could get employed and earn enough money to support himself with his vast intelligence, but the thought of merely living felt...incomplete somehow. Upon further reflection, he realized with a start that the same missing thing, whatever it may be, was missing from his current life as well! He was about to continue thinking in order to discover the nature of this thing missing from his life, when his watch beeped.
"Breakfast already? I guess time flies when one ponders the meaning of life," Cosmo said to himself, and almost, but not quite, chuckled at his own joke. He stood up, stretched his cramped legs, and headed down to breakfast.
