Gamer Reborn

I woke up at 5 AM on a Saturday morning, drenched in cold sweat, I don’t even remember the dream I had. All I know is that it went south real quick and that I woke up right as it did.

Knowing that I couldn’t get back to sleep I dragged myself out of bed and headed for the shower. I just stood there for a few minutes letting the warm water cascade over me in an effort to gather some energy before I got on with all that I had planned for the day.

As I grabbed my morning cup of coffee I sat down at the table and started to look through all the letters that came in yesterday, and oddly enough not a single one was bearing any bad news.

While this may sound weird to some that looking through letters for bad news and not finding any being a surprise let me explain. Ever since I can remember every night I had a nightmare there was something that day that went really bad or was supposed to go really bad for me.

I somewhat started putting it together in middle school, seeing as after every bad dream there was a surprise test that I was not prepared for. That's not to say that I had a bad dream before every surprise test, it was just those that I had not studied for.

By third grade I learnt to trust my gut a bit and sometimes took “sick” days after bad dreams and lo and behold I was missing out on some surprise tests. When I told my parents, bragging about my so-called powers (sue me I was 8), all they told me was that it was a coincidence and I mostly agreed with them and tried not to put too much faith in it.

I still did last minute cramming and hid cheat sheets after every dream because why tempt fate, but it was all superstitious and not something I took seriously.

That is until the day in my senior year of highschool when I had the worst one yet. I woke up with a headache and it just wouldn’t go away. The weird thing was that it happened on a Sunday and I thought I had nothing to worry about. That was true until I heard the doorbell at 7PM and opened the door to two police officers that informed me my parents were in a car crash with a drunk driver and they didn’t make it.

They had been in a crash with the son of some important politician in the local community who managed to pull some string to get him off with just probation.

As I ransacked the letters and found nothing in there I relaxed a bit, at least I wasn’t getting evicted, so instead I went to my PC and started looking through emails. Maybe there was a clue in there about how my day could take a turn for the worse.

And there it was an email from my boss telling me that they no longer needed my services and that I was being let go.

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The jewellery store I had worked at for the past 4 years just fired me out of the blue. Well I say that, but I suspect it had something to do with an argument I heard last week between the boss and his wife. Now it wasn’t an all out yelling match and I only picked up a few words outside the room but it was enough for me to figure out what had happened with today's email.

She had come to ask her husband to do a favour for her sister, I picked up something about a nephew needing a job from her side and something about a lazy good for nothing from him but I guess nepotism still wins out in the end.

After I learnt just how unfair the world was I started to just focus on becoming someone who couldn’t be just swept under the rug, I focused a lot on my studies and got into a college to study architecture with a partial scholarship and used all my free time studying or playing video games.

They were the only outlet where I could enjoyably interact with strangers without spending the first few hours being an awkward introvert. It was also what I had planned on doing for the rest of the day to blow off some steam. I was pretty upset about losing the job, but I was two months away from finishing college and having to look for a better job anyway, so I was mostly just upset at why I got fired more than the fact that I got canned.

After a full day of bad luck playing online I decided it would be fine to just go out to a bar and handle my anger by jumping in the bottle, since I was free tomorrow anyway.

I was tripping my way back home, after running out of cash drinking cheap vodka at the bar, when all of a sudden an angry voice started yelling at me.

“Give me all the cash you got!”

I felt a strong grip drag me into an alley and I felt the barrel of a gun pressed to my head.

With a small chuckle my inebriated self decided that the best response was “Thanks for helping me look, the barkeep told me I was out”.

Clearly that was not the answer the mugger was looking for as next thing I know I feel a fist hitting me in the jaw. The mugger then grabs a hold of my wrist and tries to wrench the watch off. Drunk as I am, I lose my balance and go tumbling over. I fall right and top of him and the next thing I know I hear a BANG.

As I am floating in that darkness I see my whole life flash before me over and over again. It was then that I realised that the poor needed to work hard from the very beginning if they were to ever have a chance at making something of themselves.

My early happy years with my family were the only memories I did not regret though looking back I was disappointed in myself. I had been so carefree back then doing nothing but messing around playing video games.

The only productive part of my whole childhood had been learning to speak and write Chinese, and even that I had done just to placate my mom, who insisted I learn a second language, so I picked the first one I could find that nobody around me would understand.

After the accident as I decided to get my life on track, I had barely a few months in which, through a lot of hard work, I managed to get my partial scholarship. This lead me to neglecting everything else like my diet and exercise.That then lead me to gaining weight and having a poor social life through my college years, with barely a few one night stands in the parties after end of term exams, comprising my social life as the job working to pay the rest of my tuition and housing drained me of all my energy. To finally getting killed in the back of an alley one night.

I had lost track of how many times I went through the loop while I was floating in the void when I heard the words.

“What do we have here? A mortal soul travelling through the void, I wonder how you managed not to get pulled back into the river of rebirth.”

“I could hand you over to be put where you belong but I so despise contacting Death, may as well let you there all on your own the normal way.”

As the last word ended I felt like I was spinning no longer knowing which way is up and then I lost whatever consciousness I had had in the void.