Prelude of Humanity

Chapter 3

Never having been loved is synonymous with never having been lived.

- Lou Salomé

Ring, ring, ring!

I grasped for the phone just sitting beside me, turning off the alarm.

I looked at the time.

"Seven o'clock..."

At first, my body suddenly went into adrenaline. It's the type of adrenaline that rushes your blood vessels, increased temperature in your face, ears, and chest area, prone to sweating, and clouded thoughts.

Yes, the type of adrenaline I'm talking about is panicking.

I quickly sat up on my futon, then I dug thoroughly through my phone contents, but the adrenaline quickly faded away when I saw some text just below the big clock on screen.

Today: Observed National Non-working Holiday

Phew, I sighed in relief, as I got up from the futon.

By the way, I'm using a flip phone, no I'm not talking about those modern flip phones with foldable screens. It's these bricks that have a screen on one part and a keypad on the other. Ala-chan kept pestering me to purchase a modern smartphone, but I feel like this antique cellphone is certainly enough for me: calling, texting, that sweet alarm, and a couple of handy utilities like a calendar. I don't get how new smartphones can't last a day of a charge—no, this beast of a cellphone of mine lasts for a week!

And besides, my clunky laptop does all of the modern stuff as well as a smartphone, especially for the modern age social media and messaging "apps" they call it.

I checked my messages, which happen to be coming from Ala-chan at around 6AM.

Wow, she woke up earlier than me this time.

"Akkochii, I'll be at your place at around 8, while Miko and Tomo would be together. Then we'll meet up at the square by then~!"

"Shoot, I only have less than an hour to prepare", I said as I closed my cellphone.

I quickly grabbed my towel from the closet and rushed for the bathroom as I needed to take a bath really quick (though on average, it takes me around five minutes to bathe, so I guess that's already quick enough?)

After a sweet (and horrendously cold) bath, I wore the usual: plain white t-shirt on the inner with some grey hoodie with a dark gray accent color and some jeans.

But my breakfast isn't the usual, because I instead toasted some bread and spread white cheese all over it. I figured I need to change up my breakfast every now and then because I lied; I'm fed up with rice and luncheon meat at this time around.

From waking up, to taking a bath, wearing my clothes, cooking and eating my breakfast, it only spanned a whopping twenty-five minutes, and I woke up at ten minutes past seven a.m., so if I'm right, the time is around 7:35.

I grasped for my cellphone again and flipped it up.

7:40 AM.

Close call.

When my parents gave birth to me, they noticed that I have a natural grasp of time when I was three years old. I was taken to a doctor and three pediatricians back then, and they too couldn't come up with a conclusion of what I was possessed with such a condition. The third, last, and most knowledgeable pediatrician that my parents and I went to that time just simply concluded that I have an innate time perception.

Luckily, I wasn't treated like a guinea pig that was sent to the Ministry of Sciences and further investigated, taxidermized, autopsied, or just about anything sci-fi horror they did to me. That particular pediatrician was just as intrigued as we are and did a little science investigatory in that amount of time on how I'm good at perceiving time naturally. According to them, the average margin of error of my time perception is ± 20 minutes. That, however, was the only time we did the mean average of my "ability", if you'd like to call that.