I woke up with a severe headache. The time was twenty minutes past midnight. I continued to lie in the bed and forced myself to sleep again with the comforts of AC and soft cushions. My headache only worsened and it appeared that I was destined to stay awake for the rest of the night. A little farther away on the bed, my wife was fast asleep.
I silently walked to the drawing room thinking of how to spend the rest of the night. On a table at the corner of the room was my laptop along with some files and books. It was a stylish Macbook Pro machine glistening in the night lamp. It sat there like a glamorous beach babe that you cannot resist the temptation to take a second look at. I fell prey to the temptation hoping to get some welcome distraction until I was relieved of the nasty headache.
As one would conventionally begin with, I opened my mail inbox and read the subject line of about twelve e-mails that were lined for me to read. One read “Bangkok deals plus our top family hotels” and another said “15 funny quotes on sleep”. I wondered how they found me not asleep in the middle of the night. Amidst the junk mails I found three official mails which demanded my attention. But I decided to reply the next day morning when I was in a good frame of mind. I was so irritated for receiving so many junk mails in the inbox in spite of my marking most of them as “spam” from time to time. Things have improved lately because earlier I used to be getting frequent e-mails offering up to 80% discount for Viagra (sales promotion with the wrong customer!!!). My headache was still there.
I logged out of e-mail and checked into my Facebook account. One of my friends name appeared as online and instantly a window popped up saying “hi, wassup? GTSY :-) AFAIK…….CUL8R”. The chain of alpha-numeric characters was difficult for me to decipher and I did not feel competent enough to learn a new language at this age. I quit Facebook and thought of something else to do.
Now the small smiley sitting in the task bar attracted my attention. I yielded to the temptation and logged into the messenger. All my known contacts were offline. Suddenly a window popped up from nowhere saying “Whatsup? 20/UK/f here, you?”. Another window popped up saying “It’s pretty boring here”. Then a third one appeared and declared “horny girl here come watch me getting naked on my webcam …”. Luckily, a holy angel popped above my head and advised me to logout of the messenger.
Just then I felt a soft hand on my shoulder. It was my wife with sleepy eyes. “Aren’t you sleeping dear? Are you alright?”. She learnt of my futile attempt to keep myself engaged and combat the nagging headache.
Ten minutes later we were sitting in the balcony that overlooked our garden and were drinking hot steaming tea. The fragrance of the tea along with the smell of the wet earth was soothing. It was only one-thirty early morning. The moon was full and shining bright in the sky. I could hear the occasional chirping of the birds from the trees in our garden. In the silence of the night, my wife smiled gently and asked, “How do you feel now dear?”. Just then I remembered that I had a nasty headache and it was not there anymore.
