Day 38

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

My head shot up, and the cold air in the room swept by me; the world hazed with the sudden movement in my awakening, and a freezing pinch of migraine was then present in my head. My throat was sore, as if the effect of my excessive screaming from previous loops had transferred over into this one. My throat also ached with a sharp pain, which I understood was the traumatic memory my neck bore from the onslaught of slashes by his scissors. It would never forget that feeling, ever.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The blaring alarm continued to ring in my ears, up to the point that I felt it contributing to the migraine I carried. I picked up my phone and whipped it across the room, shattering it into a thousand broken pieces. I wanted it to stay that way, so that no blaring alarm could ever wake me up to this hell of a world anymore. I wanted to stay asleep.

My bed creaked beneath me as I lifted myself from my sheets—the everlasting comfort of a warm dormant state, only to be concluded with a cold sinister death.

"When can I ever leave this place…?" I looked down at my palms, which shook uncontrollably. I also noticed that my teeth were chattering subconsciously. It could've been out of fear, anger, or even the cold winter atmosphere condensing my room. But in reality, it must've been a combination of all of them.

I exited my room and headed straight downstairs, not that I had a choice anyways. My movement throughout the house was routine at this point, uncontrolled but rather a pattern my mind followed unknowingly: wake up, turn off my alarm, go downstairs, find my indicators—the orange and the note, then search for a hiding spot or simply run from the danger that came. It'd been some time now since I'd first encountered the man in the black mask, and I've come to understand certain things. One, it didn't matter how quiet I was wherever I was hiding. He would always come and find me eventually. He moved throughout the manor as if he knew the place, because he never missed a single spot. Parts of the layout that should've only been known by me and my family were somehow accessible to him, and he'd always end up finding me; game over.

"Tsk…" The orange and note were on the table, like always. I read the note and confirmed that it was my mother's handwriting, and no one else's. The more and more I read the note, every other loop, the more bland it became. Every time I'd read her message was like individually writing off a layer of meaning each loop, and at this point, her words meant nothing to me anymore. Her note was nothing more than a filler for the void I'd become, and even that couldn't fulfill anything.

I was becoming lost within my mind, within this world.

"Am I…? No…" I'd deduced by now that I wasn't dreaming, nor awake. Every sensation felt in this world was too surreal to be a dream, but the act of dying repeatedly threw away the idea of realism as well. I was stuck in a limbo, balancing on a tight line between reality and delusion. It felt impossible to ever lean more towards one side than the other. I was bedridden.

"Eugh…" I peeled the orange in my hand, and inside the rind it revealed dark red flesh. I was confused, because I didn't remember oranges looking this ugly. They were always static in color; orange both inside and outside. But to find that these oranges were hiding a disgusting contrast in color inside made my pride trickle. I found it even more imperfect than before.

"Oh…" I realized it then. These weren't even oranges. They were blood oranges. I was quickly lit with anger, and like every other loop, I whipped the fruit into the garbage bin. But due to my sudden burst in emotion, I missed by a mile, splashing the blood orange against the kitchen wall instead. Its juice smudged and stained the white paints. "Mother'll kill me," I thought to myself. I took it back instantly though, remembering that my parents were nowhere around anyways. As for my sudden movement of anger, I was triggered by the sight of the blood orange. It defined that not only was my mother clearly unaware of my distaste in oranges, but she even managed to get the wrong type of orange. It was as if she were aiming for all my sensitive spots; the liver to my pride.

Drip.

I looked back up at the splatter of fruit juice on my wall, which had formed a dark red puddle beneath. I noticed that the blood orange's innards looked more opaque, and more viscous than before. The fruit's juice was supposed to be nearly pink and transparent, but this resembled something else.

Blood.

"Heh," I scoffed at the irony. Blood coming from a blood orange seemed like a form of art, and only in that sense would I see it disposing of its imperfections. I heard another drip falling before me, but noticed it wasn't coming from the wall of fruit flesh right across. I looked down, and saw that a blade stuck out of my stomach—the dripping noises were that of blood falling to my socks. The blood that leaked from my body drooled towards the wall, which gave off the image that it came from the splattered blood orange instead.

"Ah…" So the blood wasn't coming from the blood orange after all. Even in an unreal world of seeming imagination, my proposed perfections could never come true. The blood orange was as imperfect as always, and would always stay that way no matter what. I could understand now that both reality and the opposite could never bring me true pure perfection, maybe but a decimal off. Perfection itself was an imperfect concept, because it was impossible to achieve. That's something I was coming to understand, but had always rejected my entire life. I wanted to believe that I was the only perfect thing in this world, but that idea was slowly becoming an apparent delusions How could a perfect being be stabbed from behind without even realizing? They couldn't, and they wouldn't. Therefore, I wasn't a perfect being.

Death.