Solving The Mystery

He turned his laptop off. He turned it on again. He waited one whole minute for the homescreen to load back up. The one minute that he was used to felt excruciatingly long today.

He looked at the blue email icon again.

None.

There was nothing.

No emails. No text messages with heart emojis and words of praise.

He looked at the sent box. There was nothing there either. All the text replies he had sent yesterday were missing.

Was all of what happened yesterday a dream?

His shoulders still felt stiff from having typed all of those responses yesterday. He remembered how he slept, thinking he would respond to the remaining texts the next morning. The white t-shirt and blue jeans that he had worn yesterday to the bookstore were still on his body. With how high the excitement was running in him yesterday, he had even forgotten to change into indoor clothes before sleeping. There was no way yesterday was a dream. Too many things in the real world pointed against that.

What was it then? His hallucination? His mind, which had endured the pain of not living up to his first book’s expectation and the questioning of his abilities as a writer, had materialized in the form of this elaborate hallucination that he acted out in the real world. Was that it?

He did not want to believe that he had degraded to that state. Not yet, at least.

Frustrated, he went out of his room, still in his white t-shirt and blue Levi's.

He practically stormed out of his apartment. The time was around noon. The usual time when his eyes opened. And as is usual in summer, the sun was at its highest and deadliest.

With disheveled hair and clothes, he ran to the bookstore in this heat like a frenzied man.

He looked at the store through the transparent, bluish windows.

None.

The big blue banner displaying Delusional Distress was no longer there.

He could not believe it. He did not want to believe it.

He entered the store.

“Welcome in-”

Without even glancing at the cashier, he went straight to the rows of books piled inside. He looked at every single shelf in the bookstore. His book was nowhere to be found. The tower of books that felt no shorter than the Eiffel Tower was nowhere to be seen. As if some mysterious entity had whisked it away from its rightful place.

The cashier, with a concerned look on her face, was approaching him.

“Is everything okay?” She asked, concerned but cautious.

“Yeah.” He responded, but did not elaborate further. He had no time to waste.

He flung the doors open and went right to the convenience store next door.

Hana was there.

“Hey, I was here yesterday, wasn’t I?”

The sudden and forceful nature of his question threw her off.

“Umm…” She stumbled on her words.

“Answer me! Fast!” He screamed.

She made a face as if she were trying to remember.

With an apologetic face accompanied by fear, she responded, “My memory is not that good, so I can’t say for sure, but I do not remember seeing you here yesterday. But I also have this weird feeling that you were here too. It’s strange. Sorry, I can't give a concrete answer.”

It made sense. Hina saw a lot of customers in her day as a store cashier. There is no way she would remember who came and who did not.

She flinched back, as if her answer in the negative would somehow anger the man in front of her, and that would be the trigger for something awful.

However, Kaito felt dejection more than anger.

He felt weak. He felt lost. As if someone had cut the strings that propped him, he fell to the ground.

“A-Are you alright?!”Flustered, Hina circled to the front of the counter.

“Y-Yes.” The yes was weak, and it was a lie. Hina sensed as much, but the yes was a rejection of Hina’s intervention. Don’t ask me any more questions, was what it seemed to say.

He slowly got up.

Without saying another word, he made his way back to his apartment.

He did not remember how he made it back home. It was not a conscious decision. He was just walking aimlessly. It’s just that his legs knew that this was the only place in this world where he belonged. That garbage of a room for a garbage of a man.

Once he reached home, he collapsed on his bed.

His thoughts were moving in circles.

How could that be?

How was this possible?

Yesterday.

The day he felt like he was alive again.

The day when people came to realize that he was great again, great still.

It felt like a dream to him. He even pinched himself to make sure it wasn’t a dream. His right arm still had a red mark.

But all of that was gone today. In the blink of an eye. As if nothing had happened at all. As if someone had written yesterday on a whiteboard and erased it into oblivion the next day.

What was going on?

His head was spinning. It was throbbing. There were signs that yesterday was real. Yesterday happened. At the same time, the signs that yesterday was not real were also there and even more convincing.

He could not make sense of anything. The pain in his head became too much.

He got up. He needed a beer. Desperately. In times like these, when he couldn’t make sense of anything, or he needed to stop thinking.

He took two cans of chilled beer out of the fridge. He gulped the two down in one go.

He felt calm. He felt refreshed. His thought process had halted. The carbonation of the beer was coursing through his veins instead of hot, thinking blood.

He was trying to make his way back to the bed when he noticed something.

The black binding. The notebook.

Words inscribed on them came rushing back to him.

Although the distance was less than a meter, he dashed to grab the notebook. He looked at the back cover.

The words were there.

“Anything you write in this notebook will come true for 24 hours.”

Was this the answer to his questions?

He flipped the pages backward and reached the first blank page of the notebook. A blank page if there was nothing written on it. But, there was. He remembered. He had written something on it. When he was drunk. When he was vulnerable. When he was not able to suppress his deepest desires.

The words were there.

“I wish people came to love my writing again.”

He felt like the mystery that had plagued him was coming to light.

It was the day before yesterday that he was drunk, and he had written his ridiculous wish on this equally ridiculous notebook.

It was yesterday when people had filled his inbox with praises and love. People had come to enjoy his writing again. His books had been bought again. The stories he was sure would just disappear in some unknown corner of the internet was discovered, read, and appreciated.

Then, today, everything was back to normal. As if yesterday had not happened at all. As if some mysterious power had erased yesterday from the pages of history.

“No. No. No, no, no. This is ridiculous.” He shook his head.

He did not know exactly what time he wrote the words down in the notebook, and the time texts started appearing in his inbox. He also did not know when it all disappeared. But when he thought back to the events, everything happened in roughly a day. That is, 24 hours.

He realized that this was the most plausible explanation for the inexplicable that was happening around him. This will explain everything and leave no gaps or loopholes.

Even then, Kaito found it hard to fully digest.

Can something so movie-like happen in this world?

He was unsure. He needed answers. If only someone could verify for him whether the notebook was a real deal. But there was no one. It was only him and the notebook in his hands.

Suddenly, he hit upon an idea.

“Maybe I should try writing something in it again?”

If he were to write something again, and it were to happen and then go back as if it did not happen, then he could verify that the book’s power was real. What was written on the binding was not ridiculous.

But, what should he write?

Something concrete. Something whose results he could verify immediately. Something ridiculous. Something so nonsensical that only a notebook with supernatural powers could make it happen.

He thought. Long and hard. He came up with something.

He searched for the box of pens in the sea of plastic. He found it. He took out a pen. He uncapped it. He flipped the notebook to its second page. And he wrote…