AARON
I stir and open my eyes. I sit up and look at the clock on my desk – it’s 3:12, and the sun hasn’t risen yet. I wipe my eyes and push myself up against my pillows.

“Do you think this could be a

‘SHIT,’ I think, throwing myself out of bed and stumbling over the clean and dirty laundry on my floor to get to the desk. I flick on the lamp and begin desperately writing. ‘I can’t forget. Shit. Fuck, I can’t forget this.’ My writing goes from semi-readable to the stereotypical doctor’s “chicken scratch” scribbles. My desk is wobbling and it threatens to topple some of the train models on the shelf above. I’m panicking, though. ‘I can’t forget him again.’

“Aaron…?” The door to my bedroom creaks open and Emily walks/shuffles in, glaring because of the light on my desk. “You’re being loud. You woke me up.”

I sigh. “S-sorry,” I whisper, turning back to what I wrote down. “I…had a bad dream.”

“Okay, but can you be quieter?” she asks.

Looking back to her, I step away from the desk, sighing. Walking over towards her, I kneel down and murmur, “I’m sorry for waking you up, Em. I’ll be quieter, I promise.” She nods, and shuffles backwards, closing the door behind her.

I go back to writing. I write a few words more down before my pen stops moving, my hand shaking as Louis’s face goes fuzzy in my mind. All that’s there is what I wrote down. I sit down in my desk chair and sigh, knowing I can’t go back to sleep after this.

So I open my computer. I’m momentarily blinded by my laptop waking up, but I type out Facebook and search for Louis.

He’s friends with Erica. My eyes narrow and I think, ‘She didn’t tell me she was friends with him. That bitch.’ I scroll through his profile before clicking on his profile picture.

Louis was laughing, his emotion frozen with the background blurred out but his face clear and bright. It’s almost too white; it feels washed out. But his grey eyes are bright and…happy, for lack of a better word.

I inhale and rub my eyes.

‘This is Louis.’

I know I’m not sleeping for the rest of the night.