The Anomaly Of My Life...

"It was the same routine every single night. Or at least for the last 78 nights. Drink warm milk with a teaspoon of sugar. Brush my teeth. Make sure the curtains are closed all the way to the very end (no gaps, thank you!). Moisturize. My pillow fluffed just the right amount. Set a redundant alarm for 6 am. Close my eyes. Go to sleep.

All for what? I open my eyes to see it is 3:13 am, every single night!

Every night at that moment, all I hear is silence. The silence is so loud, I barely hear my pounding heart. An eerie feeling creeps over me as I see through the (now open) curtains, the ice glazes over the windows from the sudden cold. A smell wafts through. One that is so familiar. I know what it is, I have definitely smelt it before, yet I cannot name it. All these days, I have never been able to remember it. I have tried day after day, night after night, still zilch. It was weird that I smelt the same smell, yet I couldn't tell what it was. Then again, I didn't know what was happening to me when I wake up to see the same day at 3:13 am again, and again. I don't know why this day chose to repeat itself. After all, it was the worst day of my life. It felt as if my life was a broken radio, stuck at a really bad program. I lay on my bed till it was time for my sister to scream.

 At exactly 5.03 am my sister screams because she sees a cockroach in the bathroom. By 5.07, my parents come out of their room to see what is wrong and go back to sleep at about 5.15. I don't bother to go out. My sister, Amaira, goes out for her morning jog at exactly 5.57 am. By 6.30 my father is ready, suitcases packed, for his flight to Los Angeles. He was being sent by his office for an important conference. My mother leaves at the same time for her work. She works at her own art gallery, and it is really far, so she leaves early. I don't know why I was waiting for the house to be empty. I could've left in the dark itself, and they wouldn't even notice. I guess I didn't want to get caught sneaking out even though my parents weren't there. Not that it really mattered. Even if they got angrier, I just had to get through the day for a fresh start.

It started 78 days ago. Yes, I have kept count. I guess you could call my situation a temporal anomaly. It sounds adventurous in a comic book, but trust me, it is the worst. And it's even unlucky of me to get this day on repeat. I had made my parents angry the earlier day and today, I would get the call…

At almost 6.45, I walked down my street, heading for the Coffee House. I wanted a peaceful morning, and a long walk was what I wanted, to avoid thinking about how I was trapped in time. I entered the shop to find nothing out of the ordinary, just like any coffee shop. I had come here before. I spent fifteen minutes looking at the menu when a worker came and said,

 "If you still don't know what you want after fifteen minutes, I give you one star."

 "Can you do that?"

 "What's the harm in pretending?" I smiled.

 "Would you like to try our surprise order?" 

"Sure" I replied. He gave me a hot chocolate. The bell at the door rang, signalling that a customer has entered. I knew him, not personally, but I'd come here before.

 "I would like a Café Latte with no milk foam and a chocolate chip cookie," he said. I murmured the same, trying to match my words to his, but they weren't the same. He had ordered a different cookie. I looked back at him. He was the same person I was thinking of. That couldn't have been a mistake. At first, I thought my memory was at fault, but that was impossible. But maybe it wasn't. Maybe he was trapped too. 

I got up and sprinted towards him, stopping between him and the doors. "What are you doing?" he lashed out. "Do you live the same day on repeat?" I asked him. "Yes," he replied "I go to work for the same boring boss, do the most boring work every day, and I get the same decreased pay for my work. It is like I am living the same day over and over." He continued gazing into the infinite, lost in his own thoughts. He was of no use to me. I decided to trail him still. 

I waited till he had walked quite a few steps and followed him. He wasn't doing anything out of normal. He took me to a dilapidated cabin. I spent most of my morning looking through his window, trying not to get caught, but the man just drank his coffee and munched his cookie hungrily and washed the dishes. I only got up to go back when he went to work. I tailed him for five days and yet he just seemed a normal guy who wasn't happy with his life.

 Every day I waited for him at the coffee house to order something different, but his order remained the same as on the day it changed. I quit trying to prove something that wasn't even happening. But I knew something was stirring up. My slumbering world was making mistakes. I settled on being on the lookout but not worrying about what was going to happen.

The next few days were uneventful. I was wary of my surroundings, but nothing happened. On the tenth day since the coffee house, I was wandering near the florist in the morning, and I noticed something. I tried to contain my euphoria. I had come to the florist before and I knew the lilies were always next to the roses.

 They weren't, right now. I walked over to a woman there and asked her, "Why aren't the roses next to the lilies?" She definitely thought I was crazy. "The shipment for the roses hasn't arrived yet. That's why." She replied hastily. My suspicion was confirmed. Something was wrong for sure. That day I noted the timing for the florist incident in my Time Diary. Yes, I had a diary that read 'Time Diary' where I kept a record of important events (including the one for the coffee house episode). It was a lot like a movie, but I figured it was necessary.

Someone knocked on the door when I was lying on my bed trying to make sense of all this. I forgot it was already time. I tried to ignore the incessant knocking, but I couldn't. I opened the door to see my friends waiting for me. 

On the day before all of this started, and I mean not the day that was repeating, but the day before that. It was my birthday. My parents got me a new phone and I was really happy. My friends had arranged a party for me in the evening. I went to the party and returned losing my phone. My parents were really angry and grounded me. I understood why they were angry. We weren't rich and I knew that, and I was guilty about my carelessness.

I texted my friends from my old phone, and they resolved that they would take me out the next day. At that moment, I fell in love with rebellion. The next day occurred the same as I've told you. My parents were out of the house in the morning, my sister had college and came back at four, but she wasn't staying the night. She was going for a sleepover at her friend's house. I guess you wouldn't call it sneaking since the house was empty, but I did it. I went to the movies with my friends and spent the evening with them. That is when I got the call.

I was relishing my freedom, but then I got a phone call from a hospital. A woman spoke, "Is this Aahana Agrawal? "I replied a yes. "You are listed as the second emergency contact for Nikhil Agrawal. Due to the unavailability of the primary contact, you are being informed that the return Boeing, he was travelling in has crashed, all the passengers are being transported to the County Hospital. You are requested to come to the hospital as soon as possible." She said this and the line buzzed. At first, I stood still. I couldn't move. Then I got out of the daze and called a cab. Inside the hospital, everything was chaotic—frantic family members asking, waiting for the doctor's verdict. People from the accidents were brought in by the airport buses and some, by ambulances. My father's bus hadn't arrived yet.

The accident was severe. I didn't want to look at the people crying in another area of the hospital. I didn't want to find my mother and my sister, already on the other side of the verdict—crying in the loss of their loved ones like some of them there.

I sat in one of the seats near the clinics. Amaira, nor my mother had arrived. I waited patiently, trying not to cry, thinking about all that had happened that day and the day before. I hadn't been that grateful to my parents and my sister. I felt it was unfair—the way they were treating me, but I wasn't even trying to listen to what they had to say. I stopped my thoughts. Reliving all the happy and sad moments meant accepting something was not okay. At least, I felt that way. I tried to remain awake, but I couldn't. I fell asleep.

I thought I slept for a microsecond, and then woke up in my dark bedroom. The alarm clock timed 3.13. That's when it all started, and I still don't know what happened to my father.

Back to the present, I tried to ignore my friends, but they remained determined as ever. "You coming, or not?" Michelle asked. I decided to go. Once out of the house, I began observing my surroundings, like I had been doing for the last few days. We were heading towards the cinema hall and there, I saw that the usual crowd was there. I remembered when I went to the movies with my father. He told me they always played the animated movies on the screens near the food places because he had given the workers his piece of mind about the inconvenience of getting food quickly for crying babies when the screens are too far away. I smiled at that thought. It was one of few happy memories only I had with him. We went inside and bought tickets for 'Death Avenged: The Sequel'. A story I had no interest in. It was not even that famous. 

It was when I started looking around, till my friends took pictures in the girl's bathroom, that I noticed a horror comedy played on screen 4. Screen 4 was where I had been to, to watch A Bug's Life when I was five. I went near the doors of the screen and interrogated the attendant over there. He said that my father's advice was followed for only about two months but then the idea was abandoned. I hadn't paid that much attention to that before, so I wasn't sure if it was one of the Changes. I still wrote it down in my diary as a possibility. Over the next few days, I noticed lots of changes—my sister didn't go for her sleepover, I woke up at 3.15, a man talked to me on the phone to tell me about the accident instead of a woman, like always, the picture on my bedside stand wasn't there when I woke up one day. I then tried to find a pattern in the Changes, and I did. All the Changes left a trail that, I assumed, I had to follow to reach…my destination. The incidences seem to be happening at locations getting nearer to a common location. They also happened nearly every eight hours according to my calculations.

The latest incident happened approximately two kilometres away from my house at a post office. I didn't know what would happen when I come across the last Change. For days then, I got out of the house to look for more changes, praying not to miss a single one, as if my life depended on it. (and it did, actually)

Then one day, when I walked through the gift shop near our house. This was among the other places where I had pinpointed the Changes. I remembered that I had visited this place with my friend to help her pick a gift for her brother's birthday, post anomaly. It was 6.53 pm, the Change would happen at approximately 7.05. I quickly scanned the shop forcing my brain to store things out of capacity. It was 7.10 but nothing was out of place. Giving up, I walked out the door annoyed at the world, when I heard someone, a man talking to the manager at the pizza place just beside the gift shop. "I come here every day and Eve takes my order. Where is she?" he demanded. "Today is Eve's second day here and she dropped in sick. How could she have been taking your order from the past week?" the manager replied, frustrated at the strange man. Curious about the whole conversation, I paced up to the counter, pretending to wait for my turn to order. The man I was following took out his phone and typed something in. He was murmuring to himself, "It took so many days, but I still haven't figured it out. Sometimes I think I'm never getting out of this hell hole." 

I was so excited, considering the possibility that he could also be like me, trapped in time, that I was a second late to hearing the worker shouting at me, asking what my order was. I left her to follow the man who now had walked out of the shop. 

"Hey! Can I talk to you for a minute?" I yelled at him.

 "Just. Talk. Don't. Shout." He talked, irritably. "Are you…. experiencing... some kind of……… do you feel the same day is repeating itself and you are the only one who knows about it?" 

There was no best way of putting this in words.

"What do you mean?" He looked as if he knew something but didn't let on.

 "Why did you note something in your phone? You note the timings of the Changes in your phone, don't you?" If I were wrong, he would think I was mad.

"Wait…. Is this happening with you too?" he asked, finally feeling safe about opening up. I nodded a yes. "I have been trying to figure out the pattern in these incidents. Have you been successful?" 

"It's better if we talked about this somewhere else." I hushed him down.

We sat on a bench in the park and shared our experiences. He told me his name was Mikey. He had been stuck like this for the same duration as me and he was from the neighbouring town. Surprisingly, he hadn't connected the dots on the Changes, fully. He just knew that the incidents happened in an order that he was supposed to follow, and that had led him here. I told him my side of the story, leaving out some minor details like my family and what had happened on the last day of her pre-anomaly period.

We even compared our notes on the timings and the Changes, his list containing more of the earlier ones, with mine having more of both old and recent instances because he hadn't figured out the timings part yet.

It was a ray of hope was for me, having Aahana Awake amid this sleeping world. We arranged to meet at the park. He had to journey four hours while I had to sneak out of the house.

Mikey offered to walk me home, and while he shared his pre-and post-anomaly stories, I pitched in, only in agreement. Sometimes when I asked a question, people around us stared strangely at me, as if I was talking to a ghost.

I reached home, and that's when my phone rang. Mikey looked up at me with an unchanged expression. I didn't feel like sharing, so I declined and continued walking without a word. The phone rang five times before Mikey finally said, "You should probably pick it up, you can't keep sorrows away without confronting them." I did not understand what he meant, then.

The next few days were monotonous but exciting at the same time, monotonous because the days passed like a blur and exciting since it felt I was finally doing something progressive towards freedom. We noted the timings and locations for every incident, in my diary as per Mikey's request. 

We didn't know where this would lead us, but it was the only hope. I now hardly talked to my family because I knew they were more lifeless puppets, than humans in this world. Mikey didn't pitch in much, but that was fine by me.

On the Last Day, (or the Last Day of the Horrifically Boring, and Terrifyingly Scary, Abomination to Science, Anomaly as I would come to call it later.) we followed the breadcrumb trail and ended up at my house. This Change had to do something with me. It was 6.57, that was when they would call, except they didn't. It was 7.02 when I realized, they never were going to call. I didn't know what to do, except wait. Just then I saw the kitchen light flicker, and I saw Dad by the window, struggling with his apron to do some weekend cooking. 

I looked at Mikey and he had a small grin on his face. I ran inside, almost crushing him when I hugged him. All that while I was muttering "Oh God. Oh my God. Thank You God." under my breath. The crash didn't happen, that was the last Change.

Mikey was already inside the house, and I introduced him to my shocked-by-a-hug-for-no-apparent-reason Dad. "Dad, you won't believe this, but I was stuck in time and the same day kept repeating over and over again and I didn't know what to do and you had an accident and now you're okay and this is Mikey who helped me escape out of this trap." "Who are you talking about? There is no one there."

FIVE DAYS LATER AFTER TEMPORAL ANOMALY

I tried really hard to believe that Mikey as well as my entire temporal anomalous experience was just a figment of my imagination as my father suggested, but it was too real for a fantasy. And it seemed too good to be a coincidence, that his name was what my parents called me when I was five. Mikey. I do know what the smell was too. It was my father's cooking.