The Beginning After Everything

Chapter 6

"Good morning Pascal. Morning Zazu." I greeted as I watered my beautiful plants, making it a routine to build the happy hormones and do the things that make me smile.

"Why aren't you looking good today Bing bong." I petted its leaf, grabbing a scissors as I trimmed away all the decaying leaves stems.

Today was a rather quiet day. My sister was at university the whole day and I didn't have any classes to go to so I had the whole house to myself. Peace and quiet. How blissful. I dived right back into bed, crashing into the sheets, grabbing my phone and getting right back onto Instagram. It had been so long since I had used my social media accounts, considering I was busy most of the semester and had also taken a long social media cleanse after the breakup. The first thing I did as soon as I was back on was remove Nate from my close friends list and also remove him my stories and basically everything I could, besides blocking him of course. That would be way too harsh.

I didn't want to see any stories with him on it. I didn't want to see or hear or know anything he was up to. Getting sucked back into his life was out of the question so I refrained from looking at the stories of our closest friends. Better safe than sorry.

As I aimlessly browsed through the stories posted by my friends, I saw many of them enjoying their new adventures all over the world. Some starting university in London, Canada, the US, Singapore and more. How lucky. I got a little bit jealous by the opportunities presented to them especially those close to Europe. Some spent their weekends partying all over Europe. One weekend in France, the next in Austria. Only one can dream.

I moved on to watching Instagram Reels and I know what everyone says, it's basically Tiktok. But I refuse to download Tiktok. Downloading it would lead to a rapid decline in productivity, a result of being glued to my phone, unable to stop scrolling for 3 hours. And that was time I could not afford to lose. Hence, the best next thing was Instagram Reels.

After my eyes turned everything I saw into pixels, I knew it was time to stop. I'd probably spent half an hour lying on my side, mindlessly watching funny memes and looking up random celebrities, thinking how my life would be if I tried being an influencer instead.

I got up from bed, going down the stair two by two, still careful enough not to miss a step and fall flat on my face as I've once done before. I made a pot of my favourite tea and made a quick breakfast of avocado toast with some fruits and headed back to my room to get ready for the day.

Flipping through the hangers of my closet, I quickly realised that my style was in fact quite boring. My comfort clothes were crop tops of various colours paired with blue or black jeans. Boring with a capital B.

I pulled all those clothes out of my closet, setting them aside for the meantime. It was time to mix things up, be a little daring, a little frisky. Be bold. I've always admired woman who could easily pull of a suit in such casual contexts, not giving a care in the world to the stares and the people who looked at them. They only dressed for themselves and embodied an independent confident woman. I wanted that vibe. I needed it. Desperately.

In the furtherest corner of my closet, I found a pants suit that my grandmother had passed down to me for when the time had come for my first job in the real world. Unfortunately, I was still furthering my studies in university and had yet to need to dawn the suit. But I guess there's no better time than now.

I paired the sleek black pants with a thin cream turtle neck and tucked the rest of the fabric into my pants. I paired the outfit with some gold necklaces and small gold hoops, placing the slightly oversized blazer on and taking a look in the mirror.

WOW.

One word. Powerful. I felt so put together. As if I was ready to fight in the corporate world. That was only in my dreams. My field was in engineering, biomedical engineering in fact and I would definitely not be coming anywhere close to the business world and would most probably be holed up in a laboratory if anything else.

I could feel the energy, the motivation flowing through me and that was when I usually did my best work. I put my headphones on, switching on my laptop and getting straight on the grind. I had a 4000 word research paper to write on the vision of Gobbleguts and it wasn't going to write itself.

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"Amber, I'm home," my sister barged into my room making me jump from my seat, my fingers pressing the wrong keys.

"Sis, why do you always do that?" I whined, checking over my work and erasing all the accidental characters I had put in.

"It's not my fault you can't hear anything with your headphones. I literally called for you five times since I entered the house." I made sure to save my work a couple times, sending myself a version of the paper to my email just in case. The last thing I wanted was to lose all the progress I had made. The colour coded topographical map of the Gobblegut's retina was not something I wanted to replicate again. After an agonising 2 hours and 3 repeats, I had finally got the numbers and areas of concentration coordinated.

"How's the paper going?"

"I'm getting there. Not close to finishing but getting there. Wanna see something cool?" Linney moved over to my see my screen with a puzzled look on her face. "What exactly am I looking at?"

"It's the photoreceptors of the retina I dissected and analysed. The rods and cones to be specific. I had to measure the dimensions of hundreds of them for my data bank. It took forever."

"Impressive." She messed up my hair affectionately as I scowled at her. She knew I didn't like it when she did that and yet she always did it anyways. "Anyways, let's go out for dinner. I'm thinking Korean?"

My stomach grumbled at the thought of food. Time had passed so fast and I had been so engrossed in my work that I had totally forgotten to eat lunch. "Sounds good. I'm starving, let's go!"