1.01.

She shrugged her shoulders.

She was tired and she looked it. There were some people, not her, who wore purple under their eyes the same way they wore dresses or tuxes – dazzlingly. She, however, wasn’t one of those people. Purple never matched her black hair or her toffy skin. Under this light, purple even appeared blackish and her tiresome face exuded fatigue.

Her eyes were weary and her collar bones looked like they’ve been pressed with one too many weights per cubic inch. It was like the gravity itself was too much of a burden. She wanted to get up and leave it aside, like you would do with the luggage set, she simply didn’t know how. Where would she put the burden she carried around for centuries now knitted firmly into every fiber of her being?

Maybe that was the reason she kept on scribbling onto the once blank sheet of paper of her notebook. Some of the doodles made sense, most of them didn’t. None the less, she loved the calming sound of a sharp pencil pressed against the smooth surface of the paper. Her brain looked laser focused on the fact the pen kept building ridiculously loose paths between imaginary A and B points. At the state she was in, her brain couldn’t take more than the doodling.

It was Monday. Monday which was supposed to be plain. Regular. Ordinary. She would dare to say – boring. But she knew from the moment she got up it won’t look nothing like it. She could feel it in the sweat dripping down the spiral of her neck even though the sticky feeling couldn’t be explained.

Streets of her city smelled heavy, like it was raining the day before, except it wasn’t. The city was drunk on gasoline and summer heat which was coming to a rapid end. She refused to believe it though and somehow blamed the heat for the lack of sleep she was getting lately. Tiredness followed her around like an itsy bitsy boring ghost named George everywhere she went. She liked to think George will eventually go away but waking up third (or maybe fourth) night in a row wasn’t fun and she started to think George might never fall in love with someone else and leave her.

“Wow, I must be going completely insane.” she told herself quietly, with a semi smirk and a semi smile, both fighting to stay on her face as if they were there to make a permanent dent.

Tiredness wasn’t “artsy”, she definitely wasn’t the type, and it simply left her looking washed out, not to mention completely dysfunctional, for whatever was supposed to happen the next morning.

It was somewhere around 3 AM when she woke up last night. Her body got up because, she believed, her hands started fidgeting in her sleep. Again. It was almost too similar to that one time she had a dream induced seizure. Well, that’s what she called the state she found herself in. She wasn’t sure is there such a thing but she blamed her lack of sleep and feverish dreams (it wouldn’t be fair to call them nightmares, not when they were the only thing giving her any sign Annika is alive and well) for a lot of things and she was on the verge of calling up to heavens to check the signals they were sending her. She was too tired to crack them this time around.

That was, also, one of the reasons Mary Jane decided to stay at home, calling in sick for the third time this week. She was lucky enough to have a completely understanding team, she knew that, but she was also very well aware she was the crown jewel of it for the last 3 years. Her boss couldn’t afford to lose the best account manager “Chord Media” has (ever) seen, not when he had the fluke of finding her at a Christmas party he wasn’t supposed to be at.

Not to mention, he wasn’t supposed to be there drunk – because saying “wasted” isn’t all that okay when you’re talking about a person running the company you’ve been devoted to.

Now, Dale was a good man. He just loved a glass or two too many whenever there was a solid excuse to party and everyone at “Chord Media” knew that.

She looked again, this time around scowlingly, at the wrist of her left hand. Thin silver line, definitely too old to be called “modern” and maybe even too old to be called “from this age”, clasped her wrist tightly – to the point where she almost felt pain at times.

But, she ignored the feeling. She was rather successful at doing so for the most of it. She enjoyed having the watch, silver line being beautifully interrupted with a set of vintage numbers which meandered around it, as it was a gentle reminder time doesn’t stand still. It was a reminder her hands will be called a home again. And if there was something she would endure, it was the silly sting like pain in her wrist, she thought to herself. Peace within you comes in numerous shapes anyway, her thoughts confirmed, no matter the fact it lies within the same person.

She smiled to herself as the rain started murmuring against the windows of her light filled apartment.

The numbers on the watch changed again. Nine turned to eight, with the copper number nine sliding under the thin silver line to make room for a round number eight. The magic of the stopwatch which played in tune with the chords of fate never seized to amaze her. Her heart started flickering from the mere thought number eight meant being a minute closer to meeting Annika again and she had to hold herself not to lose the already short breaths she was heavily breathing in.

She knew, as the numbers continued to change and the rained continue to murmur, she will relive her story again, this time around, more than 2000 years later.