Nap Time Rocks!

she wakes up. the sheets are all strewn about at the foot of the bed and she can feel beads of sweat starting to collect on her forehead. casually, as if she didn’t have a bad dream, she wipes the sweat off with a sleeve. bad dream, all a bad dream.

her eyes traveled to the clock atop the desk on her right. 03:26. not bad, she thought. the past nights have not even given her two hours of sleep.

having nothing else to do but wait for dawn, she goes to her desk and scans the debris of paper there. she found the one she was looking for and read it again. for the hundredth time. the words made no sense to her, even as she read them word by word, and only felt grief and betrayal induced by that piece of paper.

…good times… never wanted this to happen… for a reason… best I had.
Good luck, for your event…

she truly must be a masochist, for hating and loving the pain that it brought to her, by reading those words, by recounting the events that ended her life now and her future.

how it came to this, she couldn’t remember anymore. everything happened in a blur. like in a time-space warp. it was delusional to think that things will be the same, give it some time. it was paranoia that pushed her to near-insanity.

the clock tick-tocked. the breeze drifted by. the loose faucet continued to drip somewhere in the house. the paper was still there, bruised and lifeless. she wanted to burn it, forget about it, pick up the phone and order a pizza.

it was morning. the order of the day meant that she must get on the train by 7:00 am, swipe in by 8, grab stale coffee from the pantry on the way to her desk in the far corner of the room, and be tapping away on her keyboard by 8:20. her sleep-robbed eyes was beginning to punish her as she stared at the computer screen. people were milling about, feeling the unusual chill in the office.

‘must really be the –ber months already’‘they really should fix the air vents, or whatever’

she didn’t care. the world can end and she wouldn’t care. her life was planned ahead of her, with him in it, but things happen. bad things. you can only do so much and hope that you get there someday, still miraculously intact. for her, the plans were different.

—

the ticket to new york, flight A021, ETD 04:30 hrs is still unused, lying on the coffee table in the living room. the house was awfully quiet, its inhabitants trapped in a parallel universe where there was only waste, sorrow, and hopelessness.

—

she decided to take off from work early and walked along the sidewalk in a dejected way that only really sad people can. nobody seemed to take notice of her, save for one; the old beggar woman was almost blind but she was sure there was someone out there. a cold draft touched her soot-stained face and was gone instantly.

—

“i’m not eating that if I were you, all those hours at the gym!” nina cried. “come on, there’s garden salad inside. made it myself!” she added, already dragging chris halfway through the lawn.

“i really don’t need to, really. why does it matter now anyway?” chris said while nina piled a plate with what looked like his mother’s untended potted plants. “seriously, I’ve lost my appetite. you can have that.” he pushed the plate away.

“what’s wrong honey? you’ve been really cranky these past weeks. if it’s still because of —,” she trailed. it was still sensitive ground. “im sorry, but you have to move on. it’s been 3 months.”

chris looked at her in the eye with an indifferent stare that he’s grown accustomed to for the past weeks that she was referring to. “do you even know what im going through? im suffering, which I need not to. i can’t sleep at nights. i’ve been trying hard to push everything out of my mind but it’s still there! there’s a weight inside me, but I can’t get rid of it no matter how hard I try to justify what I did to katrina.”

“it’s not your fault chris! how hard must you convince yourself that it was meant this way? things happen for a reason, you know that.” nina felt it was partly her fault anyway. she and katrina were good friends, until she met chris. she wouldn’t have known they were together, since chris insisted on picking her up whenever he could. katrina was the perpetual workaholic, which left chris wondering most of the time if the relationship was really worth it. but she went with him anyway.

chris shook his head in resignation; she will never understand. he might have had that future with kat, but threw it away, almost deliberately when she announced she was going away to work somewhere very far. she had pleaded for him to at least consider coming with her, but his life was right here. he just couldn’t take the risk.

chris decided to go home, but pass by kat’s house on the way. it will not bring anything back, but something called out to him and he felt he just had to.

—

katrina, that was her name. she was beginning to lose fragments of her memory to a black hole in her soul — if she still had it, or she was it — threatening to leave her only with those painful ones she was now living on.

her house was one that you would cherish in your childhood memories. it had a cool blue tiled roof and a nice front garden patch, and she admired it for a while standing on the street. she let herself into the house without calling out to anyone and found herself standing in the living room, looking at someone staring at her framed photo on the coffee table.

he was holding a piece of worn paper, alternating glances between the picture and the letter, one which she had written about three months ago. she had meant to give it to him before leaving but never got around to it since the accident. kat saw that he was crying, and felt a deep regret with those tears.

she had waited for a long time for this moment. she had pictured how they would meet again, how he was going to call out to her, and she would come running into his arms. she would cry and tell him she changed her mind about going to new york and that she forgives him no matter what he’s done. she will forgive and forget, do anything, even quit her demanding job just to make everything right again. there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him now. she took a step closer towards him, yearning to touch him, to call out his name. she stood behind him, tears already running down her face.

‘chris,’

he turned around, but no one was there.

—

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