Feast for the gullible .01.

That moment before falling asleep, have you ever dreamt of waking up to a new life?

To a new a world; a different world; where you’re the superhero. Where you’re looked up to. Where you’re appreciated, treated well, but mostly, important?

Maybe even adding a little more to that because wishes were limitless. How about waking up to a classy black and white bedroom; a ceiling that has your name on it; a large canvas over the headboard with your portrait stealing the first few rays of morning sunshine. Hey, maybe even the smell of fresh coffee brewing from downstairs. A playful morning where you discover your lover in the kitchen, beaming brightly at you like you’re the most gorgeous thing on earth with perfect bed hair and crinkled pajamas…

Not.

‘Ugh…’ I groaned, flopping my arms back down on the mattress beneath me that was as hard as a flour bag.

So I was still in the real world… great. I couldn’t help how ridiculously detailed and tantalizingly close to authentic my fantasies were becoming. Of course, dreaming about these things to such an extent where you’d actually fall into some delusion that such a life was possible was a dangerous trap. A trap I was shamefully allowing myself to be caught in.

Well, why did I have to be leading such a crappy life anyway? Not that this question was new or anything; I probably questioned myself about this more often than why I had nothing but cabbage in the refrigerator. I had made it a habit to constantly remind myself that I needed to improve somehow, but the fact that I was a lost Japanese cause bang splat in the middle of Seoul - South Korea - didn’t help my situation. From the start, I was doomed. Having eccentric parents that decided to move to this awfully foreign land on a whim when I was still in my tender years of middle school, my displays of protest were nothing short of invisible.

Both headstrong and convinced the change would improve our lives, here I was 3 years after high school graduation: stuck in an apartment I barely managed to pay for whilst my parents were probably somewhere living happily in China—‘The man from the sea, NOW RISING FROM THE GRAVE—’

I heard my favourite song blast suddenly. My eyes popped open almost instantly at the noisy theme song. Shockingly, it was the only thing that got me out of bed: the manly cries of Genji the Gravedigger from my favourite expired TV show Ninja Warriors - that starred undead Japanese assassins out for revenge - weeping in my ears that were still stuck in dreamland.

I groaned, sliding a finger over my phone alarm clock and rubbed my eyes groggily. I wasn’t ready to face the day just yet. Every morning was seemingly the same, I noted. Me grabbing my broken phone that was prone to fits of rebooting whenever I tried to type on most occasions, dragging myself to the bathroom like a zombie with one leg, putting together scraps of food the neighbor was nice enough to send me last night (the cabbage was untouched for a new record of 2 days now), and slapping on layers of clothing as slow as a tortoise.

If anybody else witnessed my morning routine, I most likely looked like a bum as I scrounged around the kitchen cabinets for scattered utensils with my toothbrush still lopsidedly hanging from my mouth. When in fact, I had a job. I wasn’t a student, and definitely not a beggar. I was living the fine life of the working class.

‘Are you ready, Momo?’

I tied the last remaining slithers of strings on my heavy jumpsuit, and giving my fellow colleague a thumbs up on entering the auditorium, nodded. ‘I was born ready, wind man.’

I worked as a fulltime janitor for a fancy local theatre that was just a few blocks away from my dingy, colourless apartment. I scoffed at just how inferior I felt admitting it even to myself. Working class my shiny buttocks… well, at least I did have an office job until exactly 2 months ago I was accused of by a particular colleague for messing up the mass printing process one afternoon. I could have cringed at even the memory of that shameful day, and slapped myself mentally for on top of that even having a little crush on that so-called colleague.

Apart from that, there was absolutely nothing I could say to justify what I did. Perhaps apart from not having any higher college education and parents who left me in the lurch to pursue their own dreams. In fact, I even lied to them over the telephone every time they called asking me how well my office job (which I felt far too ashamed to admit I was fired from) was, and somehow this lie had led to another; my moment of triumph dangerously colliding with my ridiculously overactive imagination.

‘Oh, so does that mean you’ve also got yourself someone nice and decent?’ my father once asked after the topic of my work, and so proud of my lies while in a way getting back at the starry-eyed, deceiving peer who got me fired, I answered, ‘yes, dad. He’s brilliant and he’s rich and everything about him is just wonderful. No, we don’t eat cabbage, because he buys me all kinds of scrumptious meat. I’m sure you’d all get along just dandy.’

Ah, the lies! The shameless lies! If only I’d known the guilt that would befall me thereafter, would I have never given into that ridiculous temptation in the first place… well, the revenge on mister deceit definitely felt good. The feeling of replacing his face with that of someone better, classier, more mature (and most importantly more honest) was incredible. But still, the guilt was there. Prominent like a burned cheek.

‘Well it’s not like your parents even visit,’ Sehun – my most trusted coworker whom I confided almost everything in – commented, rolling plastic cups away with his broom. ‘And if you’re in a real snitch, I’m sure you can just lie your way out of it. Right?’

‘Are you mocking me, Oh Sehun?’ I stared at the stupid grin he had on his face before flicking an empty can cap at him.

I huffed. ‘I’m not lying to them, I’m simply… bluffing.’

He squeaked as the tiny metal cap flew in his direction, however the smug expression he had on didn’t change. ‘Look, I think it’d be fun to lie—’

‘Correction: bluff.’

Sehun gave me a level look before continuing. He posed with the broom stick; one foot casually bent behind the other and sighed. ‘OK, fine. Then I think it’d be fun to bluff,’ he exaggerated with popping eyes, ‘about him breaking up with you, right? Maybe something dramatic, like he left me for another woman!’

I snorted. Somehow the possibility of this sounding honest to God filled me with a shameless sense of triumph. ‘Ooh, that sounds good. Or how about he left me for another man…!’

The two of us laughed wretchedly at the world’s next best plan to successfully trick my parents from start to finish when a loud sound