7 days before Valentine

4

"Oh. whoa...what's all this?"

I look at the intruder, it's Cue. In these past few days, I've grown accustomed to having a weird member in my household and in my life. There stood a Scythupid, he who can suddenly appear in my room without needing to open the door.

I'm not startled anymore, but no wonder he's startled by the current state of my room. In the middle of the room, lies a huge PP board for my project. On its surface, countless sticky notes are posted, linked with each other with red threads (I chose red to contrast against the white board) into a complex connection map.

"Relationship diagram around me and Wat."

I've been reexamining the timeline from the first time we met. Each of the important events in our relationship was written onto a sticky note. Any event that led to another event is marked as linked using a thread, to give me an easy image for analyzing the logic and seeing the relation between causes and effects.

If Cue has shown up, it means...

I whip my head to look at my wall clock. 11:43 pm, whoa, it's almost a new day already. I've been immersed in making the board and lost track of the time.

"When you get serious about something...it's quite impressive." Cue comments, scanning the board from left to right and top to bottom. I'm just noticing that he's in a different outfit from this morning. The bleached jeans were replaced by grey slacks. His t-shirt is gone, too. He's now wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, and also some tea stains. Observing closely, this outfit makes him look like an after-work waiter from a luxurious tea house.

He appears in my room at around the same time every night, talks to me for a while, grants me my wish, puts me to sleep, and then disappears (or sleeps next to me). The next morning, when I wake up, he's always already up. He takes shower and gets dressed, then follows me to check the result of the wish, to watch me be met with disappointment...

After that, he disappears, returning again only before midnight. That is...quite a curious life routine, don't you think?

Does he have other parts to his life, I mean other jobs, besides me? Does he meet up with other people like he found me? And do those people also make wishes like I did?

"Hey, you... Where have you been? Been serving tea or what?" I ask.

"Lots of interesting things on the board, eh? What's this? First anniversary."

I think he did hear my question, but only pretending not to and avoiding having to answer. Whatever. He might have other errands to run as a Scythupid. He has his own duty to fulfil, his own life to live. At least I did ask. If he chooses not to answer, it's up to him.

"First anniversary? It's a long story. The time will be up before I can finish." That's a fib. It's not long. It's really short. But since he ignored my question, I'm not telling him what he wants to know. That's only fair. Hopefully he can't read my mind.

"I was just asking anyway, didn't really want to hear about it." He turns with a smile on the corner of his mouth. "Alrighty, tell me, whom do you want to erase tonight?"

"Wait a minute, I have something to ask first. Do I still need to erase somebody? Right now it's already resulted in a bigger mess than before. Wat doesn't know me anymore, do I still need to erase someone?" This is the first question I've put on the top of my board, above all else. The answer will decide my next strategy.

"No worries. For every favor, it starts from the same beginning, which is when he and you have just broken up. So, don't worry, once you make your request, the event will carry on from the point of time when he broke up with you. It computes the result from there."