I slowly opened my eyes and looked up to the sky with a groan, surprised that I wasn’t surrounded by suffocating water from head to toe. An oddly protruding rock formation a few meters before the raging waters broke my fall. A miracle, for sure. Although, my head felt heavy as if something’s been wrapped tightly around it.

With all the harrowing misfortune cursed upon me by the world, Lady Luck must have felt pity on this pour soul for once and showed her dazzling smile of affection. On the other hand, it worries me whenever someone looks at me with pity and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s my unyielding pride at work. Which is to say, doesn’t amount to much anymore considering that I'd done all of those front-line services for so long. Honestly, it was fun and it did bring a lot of much needed experience for me to mature and to prepare myself for society, but sometimes smiling and being courteous all day long gets so tiring and annoying that you just get that urge of wanting to argue with someone over something so trifling. Scrambled or sunny-side-up. Depending on your answer, a debate will ensue.

As I looked up, I saw that Picasso had made himself comfortable on the wall. Comfortable might be stretching it a bit when he’s made a damn nest where I am and even right below me. There’s not much to see anymore but silk. Seriously, how long was I out?

“Okay, I can do this. Here I go!” I pumped myself up for the inevitable climb. Something that I remembered online from my youthful searching through the internet (porn wasn’t one of those things) about phobias and how to cure it was that they say it’s all in your head. I just need to not focus on the very thing that causes me to blackout. It’s also good to relax and distract yourself in the process, but confronting it and breaking through that mold of fear would be the most ideal course of action. Easier said than done, right? I tried doing it before when I went to an indoor rock-climbing gym near my apartment. Never got the courage to get past the first course. But if I do fail now, I can always rely on the safety net created by my friendly neighborhood spider.

And what do you expect, it comes into play a few minutes after I started.

“This’ll need some time—shit” I sighed, as I got back up on my feet and tried again.

After a gut-wrenching and arduous few hours of climbing and falling later, I took a short breather to recover my dying spirit before it reached nirvana. But that didn’t mean my mind would. There was something that happened back there in that place which messed with my head. I don’t know if it was time, pain, boredom, or some other unknown cause, but it did a huge number on me. It may even be the reliable ‘all of the above' when you’re not exactly sure what to pick in a multiple-choice exam. You can never go wrong when there’s an option that lets you choose everything instead of just one item. Most of the time it’s wrong, though.

“I’m getting distracted again” A sigh escaped my lips for the second time this day. Here I go again, distracting myself with unnecessary ramblings of the mind. It’s fine if the world caters to me and time stops ticking, but it doesn’t. I’m wasting a lot of time just by this alone. Look, even Picasso seems to have gone to sleep already. Luckily for me, I don’t need to sleep anymore. Now that I mention it, not getting a wink of sleep may also be up there on the choices. Wait a minute. What if there wasn’t even a correct answer among them?

“Fuck!” I really need to stop this. I’m jeopardizing my own progress at this point. I should make an example out of Picasso. I mean, look at the little fella. He practically spun a giant spider’s nest with fabulous décor and furniture. I have a question, though. How did that much silk fit inside his one-foot tall body? It’s a mystery that I’m very interested in finding out the answer. Constant production of silk takes how—

“I’m doing it again” I better just shut up and start climbing again. Maybe humming a song would do the job to refocus my unhinged mind. What was the tone of All Star again?

I hummed the chorus of the song, but after a while I started laughing without reason again. I forgot that I also had that one other issue. Oh well, I can only try to fix one problem at a time. Look. I’m blacking out again.