Title: Having Nightmares Awake
Status: Complete
Characters: Anon
Rating: SFW
Classification: One-Shot
Author: AxtasITK
Summary: Anon has been having a restless night, and decided, for some reason, to sit down and write something different than a 4chan post.

I believe that we all know that tragic moment when, with the greatest of innocence, our main objective is to sleep. The scene should be familiar to you; the crickets, annoying as shit, make their unbearable little sound, and besides that, there is nothing else that should disturb your mind, no noise, except the one you provoke. The one your thoughts created in a tangle of anxieties: insecurities, choked sobs, and distant sorrows that already happened long ago.

Literature is not my thing, but by dint of writing posts on 4chan, I think one learns really well how to convey tragedies and shit to other human beings. Or at least, I hope that's the case.

Things have changed, which isn't saying much; I ran away from my problems, and although in recent times, I even seem to have gotten a place at Volcano High, the reality is that sometimes those images of shame come back to my mind. It's on those nights when I get to see what's really inside myself: no more cynicism, not more sarcasm, and much less questionable comments.

There remains the real Anon.

The one that only shows up when no escape from reality will do. It's that moment when it doesn't matter how many shitposts I try to see to distract myself, or how many people I try to bother me in some subforum, or how much racist shit I say to a Mexican who had the bad luck to make a somewhat innocent post in the favorite dunghill of the Internet.

Nothing protects me anymore at that hour.

So, I might have to give in, and tell a story.

It isn't a green text this time though, even if it would be pretty hilarious, but not today. No, I mean a real story, the one written thanks to being isolated for a whole month in a room. It sounds like that story about Gregory Samsa, but misfortune comes to the doors of everyone sometimes, and it always manages to knock us down on a bed.

That morning was freezing. When I woke up, I felt almost nothing, but I barely moved between the blankets, and all the taunts I received the day before came back to me, like gun flashes, one shot, one after another, one more bullet in my consciousness and soon, perhaps, no living consciousness to torture.

I felt dead inside.

I mean, what the fuck do you do when someone you trust turns their back on you? When the girl you're attracted to - and I still didn't become an incel, like some, absolute merit if you ask me - looks at you with an expression halfway between pity and disgust?

What are you doing the day after? Was I supposed to go quietly back to my desk to watch them hang the "wanker" title on the fly? No, clearly not; I had to leave that place or disappear, and even if suicide was something I contemplated a couple of times, I loved my mother too much to grab a gun and remove one more burden from existence.

My old man didn't like the idea, which is normal, he wasn't too happy with me before either; he used to be a sergeant, and his son had been a partial disappointment for a long time. It would be thanks to this that he insisted that once the school year was over, college or Prussian-style discipline and yelling included. No middle ground, as if I liked having to choose between only two options.

Neutrality is really doing nothing, and it's doing something. But I digress.

My mother, on the other hand, didn't think it was something bad. I believe that I didn't lose all my empathy thanks to her. She's also tough, that's for sure, but what do you do when you see your child deflated and defeated? That same child that you saw smiling, that you saw drunk, and who you saw facing beatings with rage sparkling in his eyes when you went to pick him up from school.

What do you do when you see that little by little if he is already thin, he is also becoming thinner and thinner?

That's precisely why my father didn't scold me at that time either. In fact, he was more tactful than he had been in years with me. I owe them both quite a bit: they're not perfect, and if I'm honest living alone has felt like heaven, but what would I have done without them?

I'll tell you, I would have sunk.

I'm not worth saving myself either, but it would be a waste if I don't at least give them hope now, even if it's just studying just enough without knowing what I'm looking for myself.

Yes, this is really Anon. Some scenery, huh? I almost look like a normal person and everything. Then again, no normal person would be going to sleep at three in the morning. Maybe I should have asked Reed for some drugs, it would have done me some good to have an acquaintance who is no doubt a complete polydrug addict at the very least, but here we are.

How will this end?

I really don't know, hopefully well and without incidents. But if there are, well, may they at least be better than my life has been so far. And if I can stop being a scumbag, that would be a win-win situation already.

I'm delusional. I'm likely to do nothing, as usual.

Anyway, fuck this.

Tomorrow's another day.

[POST-NOTES]

Well, I originally wrote this because I couldn't sleep and the idea came into my head out of the blue. My writing skills are usually better, so I'm sorry if it's not the most polished product.