It was the third time my alarm clock had rung and shut up after playing some upbeat R&B song it had randomly chosen this morning. It usually does a good job of shocking me out of my bits but its failure today was not a very promising addition to its reputation. The alarm was no longer as alarming as it was supposed to be.

I had an unusual sort of night. I didn’t sleep a wink and yet, here I was, wide awake as a squirrel overdosing on caffeine, ready to go skirmish for the upcoming storms and winter.

I wasn’t however calm.

If my pounding heart was any indication, my body was either running low on potassium or there was something very wrong with me.

I had lain down all night in my bed out of some bad sense of ritual foreboding, lying to myself that sleep was only a blink away. I had countless thoughts during this time; thoughts about god, fate, about destiny. Yet, like a cat, their answers had eluded me. It had dangled a fluffy tail of hope in front of my face. Put forward an inviting paw of friendship. Before sneering at me through her charming eyes, it had sprung up to her feet and dashed away into the tall foreign shades of uncertainty.

Thoughts might be a sinking ocean, but the reality is darker and disconcerting. I could hear ghostly footsteps rummaging around in the lobby beyond the protective barrier of my door. The strides were short and heavy, their pace frantic yet calm. They clearly belonged to my mother. No doubt, she was a couple of minutes away from knocking down the front door of my castle.

Then the clock started laughing at my tardiness again. Procrastinate, as much as I wanted, I had to get up this time. What choice did I have? I couldn’t be late for school. I was happier facing the troubles of my school days than being under the piercing eyes of my mother all day long.

Usually, getting up early in the morning has a sense of ritual associated with it. You push or shove away your blanket. Get up moaning and groaning through the dull aches of your rigid skeleton and frigid muscles. Then drag your feet over the cold and dirty floor until you find your slippers, before giving out yet another yawn, announcing an impassionate and incongruous greeting to the world.

‘Usually’ I say because there were butterflies in my stomach when I got up that day. Neither my muscles nor the grim between my toes had any impact on my intentions and will. There was a sense of unease in the air ­­-- a premonition of a change. It had me on my toes, energized, though anxious.

Incredibly, I almost looked forward to the day! How nauseating.

The moment I opened the door, a plume of scented incense smoke rushed into my room on a quest to drive away any demons hiding in the corners. Not quite earthy or fruity, I could never get used to the smell.
In a race with the smoke were the reverberating chants of my father’s devout prayers. I had uncertain feelings about his prayers to the almighty jester who watched the world with closed eyes.

I was a believer once. I used to pray every night for world peace before going to sleep. Hoping my tiny interception would awaken the cold forges of the almighty and force some form of warm empathy out of them. Then I woke up and realized the hands of fate were on a fixed and unquestionable path. And no amount of praying had the power to sway them away from their incredible instinct to control everything.

I do believe in a form of God; a form in which God is a higher dimensional being trying to understand human fate and we are its homegrown bacteria on a Petri dish. 

Out of the room, my first sight was of my father sitting cross-legged on the mat on the other side of the room. Beyond him, two impatiently anxious threads of grey smoke rose toward the ceiling from the scented incense burning in front of the pictures of God Shiva and Devi Parvati.

On any other day, I would have wanted to grab my father’s shoulders and shake him up in hopes of waking him from his false religious stupor. Tell him to stop wasting his time and get on with his life. That he would live a healthier and longer life if he spent his time jogging in the morning instead.

Today, I was too distracted with my thoughts to try to get under his skin.

I was on my way to the bathroom when I crossed paths with my mother in the lobby. Puffy eyes, puckered lips, and drooping cheeks. She looked at me and made a face that people make when they have something horrible brewing inside their stomach but they hold it back just because they don’t want to bother themselves with your shit.

No greetings between us--

I didn’t want to jinx my luck either and hurried out of her sight toward the bathroom.

That sense of unease in my gut was now a choking irregularity I was coming to realize. It was not as much a stifling pain as it was a reminder of something unprecedented; like having your bladder full but without the associated pain, or sitting on the toilet for so long that your legs go numb but you don’t have a release.

I walked through the bathroom door and closed it behind me. Thankfully, my younger brother wasn’t home today. Otherwise, it would have been a hassle to get him to leave the bathroom. He likes to take his sweet time in there. Then his mother would yell at me for yelling at him. His I said, because our mother has a favorite son and it’s not me.

I checked the door again to see if the lock was holding (because it tended to come open at the lightest push sometimes) and then walked deeper inside. I took a leak even though I wasn’t sure I had fluids to drain. Then everything came to a standstill when I saw my face reflected in the mirror above the sink while washing my hands.  

Nothing had changed. I looked the same as every day. I wasn’t a handsome guy, but I surely wasn’t as crocked and unsightly as my fellow narcissist classmates had made me believe. Besides my slightly wider nose, rough dark skin, mismatched ears, dry lips, conjoined eyebrows that shared a deeper connection than I did with anyone, hair that needed grooming, and a beard that grew up in patches as if the workers were on a strike. I looked normal. I mean as normal as any budding teenager looked in the 80’s.

I guess that was the problem. I was born 40 years too late in a world that was too strange for me to understand.

My only respite was that I wasn’t fat or skinny on top of everything else.

However unsightly the figure in the mirror looked, it was me. I was familiar with it. The familiarity allowed me a momentary pause from the fulfillment and anxiousness I had been feeling since last night.

It also reminded me of how much I hated myself.

This face of mine had put me through a lot more hardship than everything else combined. Middle school kids are ruthless. Especially when you are alone and they are together. They don’t hold back anything. For a time it had felt like the whole world made fun of me. How I can still hold a smile is beyond me.

I couldn’t even fight back then. One, I was too kind; I still am. Two, I am too prideful for my own goddamn sake. Fighting back meant I was the same as my bullies. Complaining meant I was a loser. Getting angry meant they were right.

So I cried through my early days. Pushing away anyone and everyone who ever so much as looked at me wrong. Until there was no one left in my life.

‘If only I didn’t look like I do. If only I looked… normal. What I wouldn’t give if I could change myself and be whoever I want to be.’

I don’t usually have such thoughts. It was the fullness and the anxiety brewing inside me that was pushing the words out of me. Reminding me of things, I didn’t want to remember.

High school isn’t as tough as it’s all said to be, but then again we humans aren’t cut to live alone like animals in the wild. We are social creatures and it fucking hurts to see everyone else talking and laughing together while you mope all day at your desk without anyone to comfort you in your despair.

Suddenly, the fullness came back with vengeance. Before I knew it, my head was buzzing and everything in my sight was shaking, like the world was going to crumble into pieces and bury me six feet underground.

I was starting to realize that the fullness was more than just a feeling or a delusion. It was real and it was starting to act up. And that it had nothing to do with my bladder, of course. 

Unable to hold myself up through the insinuating headache, I fumbled to hold the sink's outer lip and lowered myself to the ground. The headache was awful, but I didn’t want to injure myself in the bathroom since the door was locked.

I hung over the sink like a wet rag. Making sure, my head stays over so I don’t end up vomiting all over myself, or all over the floor and have my mother chew my ears out later.

Then before I knew it, the headache started subsiding as quickly as it had started. The world also gradually started coming back to order. The bathroom walls stopped spinning, and my ears stopped ringing.

As I breathed through the last particles of piss and toilet I had just flushed down the drain, I found myself in the face with a different sort of tribulation. One that made me question my sanity.

I suddenly heard a ding sound -- the kind that those bronze bells at the front counter of hotels in thriller movies make. Then burning words came into existence in front of my eyes, hovering a few inches from my face.

I mean, I must have been feeling dizzy or something because I didn’t scream like a scream queen getting murdered in the back alley. Even though I hated doing things I was forced into, I read the message from top to bottom without missing a word. It surely felt like a pamphlet printed by some shady company to scam unsuspecting morons.

[The Daily Superpower system has heard your wish!]
[Disguise is an excellent first superpower to break free from the norm of daily life and be whoever you want to be, or simply be the best version of yourself. A well-created Disguise cannot only let you enjoy the world in its rawest form but also let you avoid trouble with the authorities by keeping them from finding your real identity.]

[Task level: E]
[ Punch your bathroom mirror and break your previous self into pieces.]
[Would you like to accept the task to acquire the ability? Yes/No]