Cupid 42

Prologue

I've never really had a fun life. My highschool days were filled with studying, stress and anxiety, my college days were the same, but it included more heartbreaks than I could count and feeling so stress that I was calm, and then it finally came to where I am now, working as a boring employee in an even stressful department store. I said I studied,  I never said I was good at it. 

My job wasn't a problem until the day after the best relationship I had ended after the guy I dated since college dumped me. Can you believe that? The day after, not only did I feel that every boy in the world ignored me, it felt like the whole world ignored me. It was as if my ex-boyfriend was the sole reason the whole world looked at me. Yeah sure, he was a highly successful surgeon at his age, but that doesn't mean he's more important than me. It doesn't mean that my entire reputation depended  on our relationship, right? 

If only my life problems stopped there. I'm not even exaggerating. They say you need rain for a rainbow to form, but guess what, my life has been a rainy day since highschool. If those times were to be described as a rainy day, my life at its current state would be described as a storm. There wasn't even a calm before it! 

But this storm is like no other. On that day, after the night of the break up, although everybody in the world ignored me, I didn't ignore them. Every person that my eyes landed on, there were numbers on their neck. Some said 58 : 112 : 7, on others it would say 7 : 6 : 54. Working in a department store, I saw lots of these. I tried asking my co-workers if they saw it too, but they just treated me like I was invisible. I rolled my eyes at them, and the fact that one of my male co-worker's numbers showed at 3 : 10 at first and began to decrease ( 3 :09, 3 :08 and so on) made me somewhat happy. Overjoyed, if I might say. After that, I just went to the fridge and took the box of cherries I bought to eat them. Food would be the only thing to comfort me, or so I thought. 

As soon as I set it down and turned round to grab a drink, my male co-worker grabbed the box of cherries and headed out of the breakroom . I shouted at him, demanding that he should not steal other's food, but once again, he ignored me. Suddenly, my mind just lit up like a light bulb. This is a perfect way to find out what those numbers mean! If I follow my co-worker, I could just say I was trying to get my cherries back if they ask why I was following them! I wouldn't be labelled as the stalker amongst the workers! So just like the plan in my head, I followed my jerk-face co-worker to the cafeteria where he sat down in one of the tables. As I was about to shout at him, a young lady  came up to him. Being the kind person I am, I didn't disturb them. Instead, I watched from a distance. They started talking, then it went to laughing, and then it escalated to eating MY box of cherries. That little playboy, I thought. I would've said something else, but I wanted to keep my mouth clean.

I decided to move to a different place since I couldn't see his numbers. I could clearly sense that he was nervous. He began stuffing his mouth full of cherries, and obviously that came with a consequence. He didn't spit out all the cherry pits, and he began to choke. At the time, I thought it was harmless. What could a little cherry pit do? I thought. But I never thought, What could many little cherry pits do?. My answer suddenly came crashing onto me as my co-worker collapsed onto the ground, holding onto his neck and his eyes pleading desperately for anyone to come save him. If that day was the beginning of my storm, this was the mighty thunder which made it even more frightening and unsettling. 

"Please, somebody, help!" The lady screamed and a whole horde of people came rushing towards them. But not me. I, probably one of the only people that could've stopped this from happening, idiotically stood there, eyes brimming with tears and my whole body quivering. I already knew it was too late. Before the horde of customers and workers even blocked my view of his neck, the numbers were already at 10 and began to count down until I finally saw a huge, red '0' hovering above my co-worker.