My eyes burst open. Air rushes into my expanding lungs. Confusedly, I quickly find my feet and look around the room. My room is dark. The electricity is down. All of the appliances have stopped working. The food in the fridge is still a bit cold, so I shouldn't have passed out for so long. The problem is I will have to throw away the fresh food that will rot in a couple of days. But the food box will appear again when that moment comes, thus I'm not worried about that now. The telly is also gone, and my phone has ran out of battery. I am cut out of the outer world.

     Being left behind. That notion terrifies me. Of all 9 billion humans on earth, only one I can communicate with. I have heard that there was once a whale whose voice frequency was higher than those of their kind. Hence, every time it called for them, out of thousands upon thousands of the whales, none heard it, and no replies it heard. How lonely would it be, to live in the vast ocean of our planet: 300 million square kilometres in size and approximately 3 kilometres in depth, and not knowing that there was someone it could have talked to. How hopeless it would be, to have tried calling out every day, every week, every month, for years, and got nothing back? Such forlorn solitude would be too much to bear. I'm not much better than the whale.

     I walk to examine the windows and find that the duct tape on one of the windows is falling out. The glue must have lost its stickiness, so I quickly re-seal them. 

     My attention shifts to the wall where the weird shit happened. It looks all the same. The same wall, same wallpaper, that I have seen for months. No appearance of the alien-looking branches can be found. It's like either they just completely vanished into thin air or I just had a hallucination. It can't be. Those sickening vines looked totally realistic; albeit undescribable. I even have some of the liquid from them on my shirt.

     While I'm staring at the wall to find the trace of the vines, suddenly, I hear a pounding sound from Andropa's room through the hole. At first, I thought she was fixing something. 'Maybe she is trying to fix the telly', I thought. But, as a while passed, I recognise that the sound is too repeated and rhythmic to be the sound of someone fixing something. So I go to the hole to see what she is up to. The scene before me stuns me. The sound is not from the telly nor any fixing. It's her head. She is thudding her forehead against the window. One time after another, monotonously, again and again, like a piston of the steam engine. Her eyes fixate on the unknown subject outside the room. They look soulless and blank, almost like the Masksie's. Her forehead is cut, but I am pretty sure it isn't from the window since I can't see any shatter. As she is pounding her head with the glass, her blood staines it, tinting it like a fancy mosaic red glass amongst those on the rose window in the church. I try to say something, anything, to make her stop, but nothing comes out of my mouth. All my thoughts, my words, are locked up in the unreachable wardrobe, deep in the fathomless abyss of my encephalon. I don't know what to do. All I can do is to stare at the scene with my heart filled with all the quandaries in the world.