I ran to the staff bathroom which was in a room behind the counter Mr. Jordan used to call the office. It was basically a paperwork room, but it also had a small bathroom for emergencies like this. I opened the door and ran to the toilet, and poured a good part of my breakfast there. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself. After, I walk over to the sink and wash my mouth and face as if it were possible to wake up from a nightmare.

I should be dreaming or delirious, it was the only explanation. Did I get in such a bad state as to hallucinate distortions of reality? Or was it me the problem? It felt like I wasn't living in the real world at all. I was afraid that I was developing some kind of mental illness because it was the only possible explanation for the events surrounding me.

I close my eyes and try to mentalize myself in the present again, to see if anything could change. But when I opened them, I realized that it was just me there. It was the same white face with freckles, the same bathroom of the antique store, and my own blue eyes staring back at me.

The whole thing was already making me scared, but nothing seemed to really help. Everything I did, everything that appeared to me — my phone, my delusions, and this feeling of lack that I did not understand — everything seemed in some way to be interconnected. I just couldn't understand where, in fact, these facts were intertwined.

I sighed and held my breath while staring at the mirror. If I mentalized enough, maybe I could block out all the sounds of the place and focus on myself. Perhaps, despair would not take over my senses. Or maybe that way I could find some explanation within me for what was going on.

My pressure gradually eased, along with my heartbeat. I counted to ten in a decreasing manner, and by the time I got to number one, I was able to breathe normally. I realized that I was still holding the cereal bar, and I ended up eating a piece. Which was useless, because the taste was horrible. I ended up throwing it in the trash, and I rinsed my mouth with the sink water again.

This time I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, and I picked it up again, realizing that there was a message from Chadwick from the 12th of July, which I knew to be today. I opened the app as soon as possible to see what it was saying:

 

MESSAGE

 

Chad Jordan: Hey Noah, can you come with me to choose an outfit for Saturday's show?

Chad Jordan: Luke and the other guys are going to wear the basics, but I want something cool to wear. You know me, I have good taste ;)

 

I was looking at the phone without knowing what to answer. What if that was a virus? If it was a simulation? I was so afraid to do anything in this reality that I knew it was false, that I decided to take actions that I rarely did. I decided to call him. It only took a few seconds for him to actually answer me.

“Hey man...” he said in a clear voice of surprise “Hm... I'm sorry if I made you worry, you didn't need to call me.”

“Chadwick, I need you to answer me a serious question. I need you to be honest with me, and don't judge the things that I'm going to ask you.”

“OK…?” he coughed, stammering a little “Aah… Noah, I really didn't want to disturb you, man.”

“Who's Alex Diaz?”

“W-what?”

He looked pretty confused. But I wanted to make that story clear, I needed to know what was happening to me.

“Alex Diaz. Who is Alex Diaz?”

“I never heard that name in my life.”

His words, as much as they were expected, shocked me. The problem was me, then. It was really me who was going crazy not the world around me.

“Chad, listen to me... someone called Alex Diaz texted me as if he knew you. Are you sure you don't know this guy?”

“Noah, you know who my friends are. I only have you, Luke, Jorge, and that guy Miguel. You, and the guys in the band, that's it.”

As soon as he said those words, it was like a breath of air got stuck in my lung. He was telling the truth, although it was very different from mine. I should be stuck in this situation, alone, while the rest of the world continued to function normally. The problem was me. I was the equation outside the curve.

“I am feeling weird today, it seems that I am living a very bad dream. I'm sorry for worrying you about…” I did not want to explain to him what was happening to me, so I decided to continue “Listen, what time do you want to go out shopping? I leave your father's store around 6 pm.”

“Ah, cool! 6 pm is great! I think we can have a pizza before since you’ll be hungry!”

I laughed because it was true.

“Okay, so I see you...”

I couldn't even finish talking to him, because my eyes suddenly locked with the image forming in the mirror. It was him again, he was there. Looking at me intensely with those big brown eyes as if he could see part of my soul.

“Noah…? Are you there?”

I could hear Chadwick's voice calling me over the phone, but nothing held my attention towards the boy finally appearing to me. The mirror was wide, and it took up much of the wall. It seemed that we were looking at each other this time and that mirror was the only barrier. He came over, and I did the same. The boy in the denim jacket had black hair, but was straight and undercut. He was well dressed as if he had left a private office in the city center. He breathed as anxiously as I did, but unlike me, he didn't look scared. He seemed to know what was going on.

He raised his left hand, showing his little finger to me. He was showing it because he also wanted me to do the same. And when I finally did, in the same second, the world seemed to collapse. The lights of the bathroom started to blink and exploded, the floor was shaking and the mirrors suddenly break all at once.

All I could see was him. All the forces in the world seemed to come from him, or make me go to him. But I couldn't. I couldn't take a step beyond the mirror that separated us. It was as if all that feeling of strangeness, incongruity, and pain, was now explaining to me that they existed in my heart because of him. It was he who made me feel all that.

The phone fell out of my hand when I started to cry. I didn't understand why I was feeling all that intensity. He was still looking at me, and we both had little fingers parallel to each other, followed by a red thread. The boy was crying too as if he couldn't bear to be there on the other side of the mirror, unreachable.

I also couldn't stand it, even though I didn't know the reasons for it. I just felt that he was the one I needed. But he seemed to be walking away, getting farther and farther away, taking steps back towards the bathroom door on the other side of the mirror. With every step he took, I felt the need to take one step forward. And when he finally left my sight, something broke inside me.

All the feelings came as fragments of memories, but they were not there to be saved. I felt love, anger, desire, lack, pain, and grief. I felt everything I never felt in my life. My heart was about to explode, like a star when it is about to lose its own light. I closed my eyes, wishing it all would stop. Wishing that the lack of him would leave me, that the despair of the pain could not reach me so deeply. May the waves not take from me everything that looked good, that seemed to be genuinely mine. But it was in vain. When I closed my eyes, I could only see the darkness, feeling my tears overflow from me.

The world seemed to go round, but I was standing in the same place. I still had my eyes closed and my whole body was bending over me, on the floor, on my knees. I cried because I felt lost. I felt myself losing something that I didn't remember what it was. Not even the taste, the texture, the sounds, none of that was possible to remember in the back of my mind.

It only took a few seconds of silence for me to compose myself. Gradually, I felt myself again, and I opened my eyes hesitantly. The scene had magically changed, and the entire bathroom at the antique store was gone. Now, I was kneeling in the middle of the wooden floor of my room, by the half-light of my orange lamp.

I looked around, and I could see everything with familiarity: I had the wooden wardrobe in the left corner, the mirror right on top of the study table, and my entire manga collection was there too. On the wall, however, I could see some square marks, which I suspected were posters that were removed.

I approached the table strangely. I was sure that some things were missing, be it the posters that disappeared from the wall, or even some pictures from the bulletin board. It looked like there was too much space that was waiting to be filled again. Or maybe, it all fragmented for good. Every part of that little corner that had always been so special to me now seemed completely strange. I didn't recognize my own heart anymore.

The radio was on, Cho Choung Woo's song, As Flowers Bloom And Fall playing again. It was familiar but painful. I didn't feel like dancing when I heard it. In fact, it seemed that that song took a good part of what I still had in me. I tried to look for my phone again, and I felt it vibrate inside my pocket. I didn't have to unlock it to be able to see who was texting me, I could clearly see the name shining in the notification. Which, by no means, made me calmer about that situation.

MESSAGE:

Alex Diaz: Chadwick told me that tomorrow you can't go to the band's rehearsal. I'm so sorry, Noah. I didn't know that his parents would complain about the picnic.

Alex Diaz: I swear I took that wine with good intentions... you know, to relax. But you are weak with alcohol, huh? Haha.

Alex Diaz: It's even a little cute;)

 

Picnic? I didn't remember any picnic.

I checked the date of the messages and saw that they were on the 19th of July, four days after Chadwick band's concert. This meant, that somehow, Alex Diaz was involved in the story. I didn't know who he was, let alone how he was texting me from the future, as my phone still said it was day….

17th.

July 17th.

My heart sped up, and the world seemed to want to spin again. July 17th. God, what was going on? Was Chadwick's show over yet? Was I stuck somewhere, or was this a dream?

I ran to my computer, opening the laptop in a hurry. I typed in the password that I remembered to be a weird combination of numbers: 120193. And as soon as I typed it in, I stopped in the same second and pulled out a post-it from my school supplies to write the number there.

12 01 93

The number was familiar to me. It felt more like a birthday, something I never used as a password because everyone knew how ridiculous it was to guess birthday passwords. And this clearly seemed to be someone's birthday. Someone I didn't remember, or rather, didn't yet know. With shaking hands, I crumpled up that post-it note and opened the search window on the computer. Researching realistic dreams, I didn't get any results I wanted. The internet was talking about comatose patients, astral projection, and, going to the scientific side, the state of REM. That one caught my attention, and I ended up clicking on an article that explained everything about the phases of sleep.

“Tsc ... you won't find anything there, Noah.”

I jumped on the chair when I heard a voice behind me. I turned to face him, the dark-haired boy in the denim jacket. He was looking at me intently, while he was sitting on my bed with his hands in his pocket. I wanted to scream in fear, but that was not the first rational reaction my body had. The reaction I had was to walk over to him and breathe really fast. He looked back at me with a smirk as if he already knew everything I should have known at that time.

“You are very determined. You really intend to go to the end of this process” he gave a sad smile “It’s not like I didn’t expect. You were always like that.”

“What ... who are you?”

He shrugged, walking around my room as if he already knew every point of that place. He smiled when he saw the radio, and the music he was playing.

“I thought you hated Korean ballads” he smiled wide at me, amused.

I looked at the red radio playing the song on repeat. I didn't remember not liking that song. In fact, I remember that I spent hours studying and listening to it for many days when I went to take the entrance exam for college. I did that because most of the time it calmed me down to think about this song. I just didn't know why.

“I don't hate Korean ballads. I just…”

“I just hadn't found the right one before, and this one is incredible!” the boy said, completing my thoughts.

I was speechless because he got it right. It was exactly what I was going to say.

“How did you know I was about to say this?”

“Because of what you told me when I first introduced you to this song.”

He was serious. I realized this because the expression on his face was one of pain as if he had also felt everything I had just been through.

“Who are you?”

He shook his head.

“I cannot say. This can complicate things even more” he moved around my room, letting his gaze pass directly over the wall without posters.

He stared there, arms crossed. He analyzed all the other areas that I had just checked: the missing photos, some papers that had been torn from the bulletin board, and even the post-it note that I had left crumpled on the floor. He bent down, picking up the neon pink paper the second he saw it, and smirked when he read the numbers. 12 01 93. He had some lonely tears in his eyes when he crumpled the paper again himself, stuffing it in his jeans jacket pocket.

He looked at me, and I could see his feelings overflowing as if they were too much to be contained within himself. I didn't know what to feel there, looking at those brown eyes. Part of me felt something about his presence, as strong as a supernova, as hot as a summer afternoon, but as cold as Mount Everest. Confusing feelings made me hesitate in that situation and confused me.

He looked at me as if he had lost the war to Death.

“I have a million things I could say now because I don't know when I'll see you again until all this is over” he started to speak, but swallowed hard as if he was fighting not to cry, “But I won't say it, because you have to make up your mind about us.”

“Us?”

“Don't be late, Noah. Time is running out, and things can get more complicated than they already are.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, by the same second that he disappeared again.

Right before my eyes: he just disappeared. I was shocked, not knowing how to react. It didn't seem like a dream, but it wasn't real either. So what could it be?

I couldn't find the answer.