Misfits

2 | a good reason to be up at four a.m.

❝even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise❞
ｖｉｃｔｏｒ ｈｕｇｏ

___

ＴＨＩＮＧＳ are quiet for a week while Mom deliberates my offer.

And in the week that passes, I continue to show up at the end of my mother's hospital visits uninvited throwing my best puppy eyes (which she easily ignores), plead with my grandparents to defend my case (which they skilfully decline), and guiltily ignore Willow and Markus's texts wondering what happened to my returning to Alpha last week...

The first real change to my routine is the day I wake up at 4 a.m.

At 4 a.m., everything hovers painfully in the middle. Lingering on ending a late night, lingering on beginning an early morning. 4:03. The luminescent red figures etched onto my digital alarm clock feel more like a warning than a gentle reminder of the hour. They're an aggressive plea to return to bed, to salvage what I can of the night and to wait for sunrise to begin my day.

But yet instead, here I am: shedding my covers before the crack of dawn, abandoning the warmth of my bed in favour of the office chair behind my study. At 4:05 a.m., I find myself turning on my bedside lamp and blindly feeling around the tabletop for a pen, while my other hand reaches for one of the table compartments to pull out my journal.

As someone more likely to be falling asleep than waking up at this hour, there are very few good reasons to wake up at 4 am. Unfortunately, writing down important visions I have right before waking up happens to be one of them.

The two individuals from my vision stick out vividly in my mind, like black ink against white paper. I press my pen to the page and begin to write. Two teens. Blonde-haired female, white-haired male.

It's them. I know it is.

A clock. A cafe. European style architecture and an ancient courtyard.

In comparison to my other visions as of late, this one is refreshingly detailed. It's a stark, yet welcome contrast to that of last week, which in my memories, I recall as nothing more than a vague, empty abyss of darkness.

Recounting this dream takes up nearly a full page in my journal, and excitement starts to bubble within me before I can help it.

This could be another dead end, I try to caution myself. It wouldn't be the first time.

After weeks upon weeks of grasping at straws that withered to dust all too quickly, you would think I would know better. By now, I should have learnt my lesson, guarded my emotions and walled them with bricks of caution, bracing myself for disappointment. But still I don't. Still, here I am, vainly clinging to hope.

I squeeze my eyes shut as the cafe's logo flashes through my head. A sign hangs from the roof. Long, elegant letters that sweep over the terracotta rooftop. Madame Florentino's, it read.

I lean forward to power on my computer. My fingers rap impatiently on the keyboard as I wait for the monitor to start up. Mentally, I begin to piece together bits of information from the vision of the cafe's location.

Sometimes, I've found, hope can be the cruelest of emotions. It burns most ardently when it is most futile; drawing out the inevitable, playing babysitter with the dread and the doom you try to push away to the furthest corner of your mind.