Chapter 1.7 - Inspiration at Night
That night, Mirei had judged herself as being somewhat useless and went to bed early. Drifting off wound up being surprisingly easy. Her eyes were dry and heavy. Just sinking away felt good. But in turn, she woke up just that many hours earlier and found herself completely unable to go back to sleep. Sluggishly, she eventually reached for her phone. It took her three attempts blindly in the dark to grab and remove it from the charging cord.
(Ugh. 3am?)
Somewhat at a loss at what to do at this time of night, she checked the weather. It was going to be sunny the next day. She checked the alarm, same time as ever, just about sunrise.
(Tomorrow is going to be a torture.) She thought as she imagined waking up from the alarm, should she fall asleep again.
She went through her phone’s notification bar. No chat messages. No emails beyond two spam messages quickly deleted, no news articles of interest she hadn’t skimmed on the train ride this morning. Her eyes were also too weary to read anything longer like an e-book. She clicked over to the social media apps instead.
(What a pain…)
There were suggested videos, but each was spearheaded by unskippable video ads she couldn’t stand watching for longer than two seconds. The noise hurt her ears. She moved on to another app and scrolled through the timeline of chirps. Aside from the occasional ad-chirps, there were text heavy ones with book covers attached, frantically repeating announcement countdowns of new releases mixed into mostly animal pics, animated GIFs, drawings and short videos. They were all cute, silly, carefree or overly enthusiastic, but also just made her feel somewhat alien right now.
Mirei rolled over onto her stomach and buried her face into the cushion. But while her eyes thanked her for the relief, her mind felt bored as hell.
Soon enough, she turned over and stared at the phone screen again.
(03:10…)
Time seemed to crawl forwards. Mirei decided to stop looking at her timeline and instead sought out the accounts she checked so regularly, she never missed any updates or posts.
There was one account she especially enjoyed, which called itself the 'Crabapple Hermitage'. It was quite an odd one that seemed to have set a re-chirps only rule for itself. The contents they chirped were extremely all over the place. From cute animal pics to history trivia, pretty flower arrangements, artful sweets, fast forwarded cooking tutorial videos, luxurious gardens, colorful sunsets and rainbows, precious stones and antique art, modern designs, handy appliances and gadgets, book quotes, reviews and reactions or in between all these wonders of nature and human achievements there were sometimes also just any random quotes that expressed a mood snippet frozen in time. In fact, Mirei got her home delivery box after it was picked up and chirped onto her notification bar earlier that year. Its dark blue design had spoken to her immediately.
Chirps were a bit irregular on this account, but there usually were at least between two and four a day. One of today’s two was a white cake. It looked a bit plain. The shade of white was also similar to all the white she always wore to work. Mirei quickly skipped over it for the next one.
It was a very grandiose white flower with a purple core that felt like looking inside a trumpet’s bell. Its text caption indicated it was a sweet potato’s flower.
Mirei felt a shadow of a frown emerge and let her phone drop again. It fell right next to her face. She also let her cheek slump back into the cushion and laid there maybe another ten minutes soaked in listless boredom.
Suddenly, she grabbed her phone again, scrolling upwards. Staring at it intently while its screen illuminated her weary face, she stood up without even looking at where she placed her feet.
Later that day, some of the housewives of the neighborhood would whisper to another about some weird thumping sound that reverberated across the walls and beams of the apartment building. Very wild guesses were made and none of them were ever verified, as it never happened again.
