Awake

It was 3:07 AM when he looked at the clock and realized that he was going to stay awake another night; it became sort of a habit of his to spend time online, in front of his notebook speaking to strange yet nice people or reading and browsing hectically the recommendations Google Reader gave him. It was the usual rush, the feeling of getting high with sleep deprivation, one of the perfect drugs in his opinion.

His nights were short if by night we understand the period in which he slept; around 3 hours per day with something extra in the weekends to keep him going. The rest of the time it was just routine: waking up at around 6:30 AM, checking his email hoping he would have received anything else but spam in the 3-4 hour interval since his last check, reading his newsfeeds and then making his way into the city for a sprawling day. He didn’t drank coffee nor did he smoke… the tech and the occasional meetings with his girl friend were more than enough to keep him energized during the day; well, to be honest, he didn’t use much energy seeing as he wouldn’t do any physically challenging work and the intellectual one was, for most of the time, just part of the routine.

He would get back home, plug in his notebook to charge and go online to relieve some stress through gaming; he loved voice-chat, he loved his head-set and he loved the community. After failing to organize real life meetings like the ones he did when he was a little younger he retreated in the virtual playgrounds as Dungeon Master and Community Event Scheduler. It was his responsibility to drag people in the servers and keep them there. He once again had the power.

He mostly missed his girlfriends presence in his life. She was on her path to success by following a great college and getting a double degree in psychology and criminology, path which required her total dedication; although he missed her a lot he could not bear to tell her that because he was proud of her and tried to support her in any way possible; he learned to live with hearing only her voice for long periods of time and getting together only on Friday’s or Saturday’s twice a month or so. He loved her to much but he was strange: he sometimes neglected her only to smoother and suffocate her the next time they met. He thought it was due to the fact that he was sometimes uncertain that she still loved him, but he was just paranoid.

It was 03:25 AM…