What is life? My head spun around, feeling the immense bad omen swirling all over where I stood.

The field track was busy. Students in their sports fest uniform, preparing for the final contest between the three teams. A race that will determine who will break up the tie.

I never understood the exact meaning of life but funny thing though, it gives you a chance to breathe at the same time as trying to knock you down to the ground. Or maybe worse, to the depths of hell.

Murmurings crowded my ear. Patchy noises buzzed around as if they were flies. They wore their long dark coats like capes, strapped to their back, being gushed by the wind. I worked my brains, finding solutions to overcome the problem I've been faced with. But since all five of the ghosts were actually one and the same person, how could I ever beat two birds with one stone?

Correction: five birds with one stone?

The most irritating question I should have asked was how could I defeat someone who came from what's eventually to come?

It was a tough part of my life. One that had been with me since the day I first breathed in this world and had a collision with an unjustified mystery. For some reason, I've often wondered that all of this might be worthless. Till someone had spilled the beans, and to think that someone was also me.

Me. From the future. In another timeline. Another world to be exact. The concept of everything people deemed to be fictional was my reality. Thus far I've encountered time traveling, parallel universes, paranormal entities, and countless mishaps for the whole fourteen years of my profound existence.

What was next? If it would be in exact words, something far more worse. It would be idea that would possibly break my soul into pieces if ever I failed to ignore.

I shrugged the cold thought away that replaced the warmth of the sun to chillness in my bones. Creeping and plucking the serenity within my limbs.

The dreadful disturbance above all of it was that the ones from the unfolding time had died and had come back to the past to haunt their younger self.

If someone out there was ever thinking about switching lives with me, my entire world was catastrophic and I'd rather not recommend doing such a thing.

My life had not quite been ordinary as everyone must've thought. Complication was my second name. Nobody really knew me well.

Certainly, not my best friends who had been looking at me like I was some sort of an idiot. I tried to block out my senses, forcing myself to smile and keeping my appearance up. Seeing the faces of the ghosts look exactly like mine didn't exactly help, annoying me more than I should've been.

My lips twitched to scream my lungs out at the invisible forces. On the other hand, the living people would note down that I was crazy. Guess, it was another win for them.

Truth be told, I had thought of myself as a lunatic. I mean, why in the world would I see ghosts? It's certainly not because of an apocalypse I was to bring if I were still alive by my eighteenth birthday.

The idea of it still pricked me unconsciously, turning my world upside down. Without warning, my smile manifested into an apodictic frown.

They're all an image mirror of me. Names didn't matter when I still couldn't compare them from each other. The only difference was the color of their hair which they dyed with some astral color they bought in Spirit World. I hadn't been there and hadn't had the chance to verify if it was real but I concluded: it must've been.

All the ghosts from my future were imitating each other. I couldn't recognize who was who until the five of them sacrificed their prospering brown locks. Other than their deathly faces, the phantoms' hair were as striking and vivid as it could get.

As much as their personalities, if I'd add.

"Isn't this that day?" one of the ghosts said. She beamed, blue orbs sparkled at the field track as she levitated above it. The vibrant flames of crimson hanging over her shoulders signified she was Eii, a name to identify instead of being called Keiko from the Future One.

"Oh that's right! It's another major day, for you." Another gasped. Her upside down buoyant body caused her dark shades of chestnut hair to fall on one of my bald classmate's head. Dee intentionally did it on purpose; her eyes glinting in mischief and craze. For a second there, pride glossed her lips as it curved into a grin.

Blanked out, I acted confused. My awareness short circuited that I couldn't exactly remember where I was standing. I asked them, "What will I do?"

"You'll run, duh." Bee's straight face gazed at mine. Her skin bled with the earnest of matters.

Tell me more about what's to happen. There must be something else they hadn't told me. I demanded in my head though the spirits didn't hear me like I wanted them to. I couldn't just scream out of the blue like a madman in front of the public.

Curiosity sparked my circuits. Too much of the human error compound to flow in my veins would take the key of control away. Without dominance over my deep emotions, I'd wreck the reputation I had built for myself.

"Bluroze?" A sharp dark voice flushed me in a wave of shivers.

My head veered to Sir Michaels. His crooked teeth displayed once he gritted. An air of fury danced around the atmosphere between us. His forehead wrinkled, brows narrowed down, enforcing dagger glares at me.

"Y-yes?" I bit my lip. A violent volcano about to erupt from his pores any time now. Red masked Sir Michaels' face while he was being mocked at by the ghosts of my future.

He snapped, "What do you mean 'yes'? I've been calling you for five minutes, where has your mind run off to, talking there by yourself?!"

A sheepish smile slipped from my lips. Ears turned scarlet though I managed to hide them with my brown strands. I glanced at the spectral figures, flying above the track field, all of the ghosts giggling at how ridiculous I must've looked while sending expressional I'm-angry-at-you-messages to them.

"I'm sorry." I lowered my head down. There were still chuckles by the wind, ones that taunted me deliberately. I ignored them, breathing deeply to regain my outstanding composure. "I'll pay attention next time."

"You better be," he pointed out.

I nodded in reply, staying silent. This couldn't go on for much longer. I had to find the main reason how my life instantly turned to a threat that could destroy the entire world. I had to pursue the answer. It was the only way I could go back to being ordinary. If I ever had been normal from the beginning of everything.

When I was born, my parents had told me I was special. That I was going to be someone great and grand. That I was born to be a leader and I'd rise to the top of the hierarchy.

Talk about special. I could hear their voices and I remembered every single memory from my childhood. I never received the so-called "childhood amnesia" normal people had.

At the age of one, I started seeing ghosts. At first I had thought they were just smoke or fog until I had realized the pale face molding on their heads. A ghastly profile, determined to scare one away.

They told me to call them by alphabetical names so that I wouldn't confuse them with myself. I couldn't understand what they meant though I still went along with it. Eii, Bee, Cee, Dee, Iii; the titles of the five ghosts who appeared in a snap.

Despite having such dull skins and all of them sharing the same face, they comforted me. They kept me entertained through their cryptic words I had yet to understand. They had kept me silent through the night when my parents were asleep or when they had left me with my nanny, Emilie.

Spirits like them, I thought to be normal.

I was wrong and I remembered the very first word I said to my nanny. The very first word I absorbed from the frail souls, floating and stretching out their grayish red lips into a smile.

"Ghost," I babbled, pointing at the ceiling where the phantoms had gathered. That peculiar expression of the nanny haunted me until today, not knowing what she was thinking or feeling. I hadn't known what went wrong.

When I was three, I gained curiosity and eventually sought to learn.

The matured awareness that had rushed in my veins shook my innocent mind awake. It opened me to see the world without a mask, all corners of it dangerous and dark. My eyes had trembled upon the unsightly cracks and segments mapping out the world. Fire ravaging from everywhere as humans bowed down on their knees. Each and everyone of them was begging to survive.

Anger and fear, the first two emotions I could describe. It was the initial moment whereas I figured that seeing, tasting, or feeling emotions were unlikely usual.

I was called special. But was I still considered a human? Define special and differentiate it from weird.

"Why do you all look alike? Are you twins like Maddie and Annie?" Sparkles had lit up the room when I asked my first question, waiting for their response.

"No, sweetie," the blonde had answered in a breathy voice. "We aren't twins nor are we siblings."

"Is it a ghost thing?" My tone had lowered down, hearing the nearing footsteps to check on me if I was sound asleep.

I had not realized it, not until the present time, but they always told me that it was a "ghost thing" whenever they didn't want me to know who they were or what was going on. I once surmised that the ghost thing was perhaps similarly the same with "adult stuff" my parents continuously remarked.

Mom and Dad loved me for who I was. They may be leaving quite early and arriving home late but I didn't feel any hostility against them at all for leaving me home alone. Maybe it was due to how I had remembrances of them that made me feel as though we made a lot of memories together. Enough to allow me to spend a year almost without them.

Hell, they even said that I was not like other kids my age; something most parents won't even bother telling their children. I had to live with that and the oddity of our family.

Having Emilie to take care of me as the nanny, she once brought me to the park to make friends other than the twins I've clung onto. I always believed those kids Emilie introduced to be immature for five year olds. But it was I who was completely different from them. The way of thinking, strategizing in games, the way of speaking, using a vast vocabulary wherein a toddler hadn't yet learned of. The way of solving problems was not expected from someone like me.

What my parents declared were true.

Then, I tried to come clean to my friends and tell them how in the world I was practically named a prodigy.

After revealing how I could see ghosts and that they were the ones who taught me, my "friends" called me names, defining my whole existence as terrifying and settled on the fact that I was a psychopath. They never bothered to visit me again after that nor did they attempt to talk with me. I had to accept that it was a part of me whether my friends liked it or not.

Still at the age of five, I discovered how to keep a secret. I concealed the fact that I could see what was supposedly invisible and could remember everything that happened to me in this life. I figured that it would be easy, like every child presumed. I thought I could live a double life freely and yet I was wrong once more.

Being a teenager, there were a lot of battles ahead. Not just studies, but also mean girls, bad boys, evil witch teachers, and a wholesome of an apocalyptic life.

When I emphasized apocalyptic, I wasn't kidding. The world would one day turn into ashes and dust if I were still alive.

Three months ago, I became fourteen. Suddenly, tons of heavyweight suddenly strapped themselves to my spine. A burden on my shoulders and the fate of the world rested on the palm of my hands.

The five ghosts finally had told me who and why they stuck beside me. More importantly, the devastating reason I could see their eerie and evidently transparent shades.

"You're not normal, Keiko. You have a great power inside you that might burst out any minute. We'll be here waiting until that day comes. We'll be here staying ang protecting our past self, you. We'll not leave your side until the spark burns brightly than before."

Even Keiko Bluroze, the so-called prodigy couldn't solve the enigma cases beheld to me by the ghosts. Confusion coated my mind, having to process what I was missing and what I could do to solve the puzzle.

And that's when they made me aware in a part-the only part-that I could comprehend.

Bee indicated, "You're a ticking time bomb."

"That might go off any minute," continued Cee.

"So we must keep you under the wraps and protection. You can't implode now, you still have to find what you're looking for," said Iii.

"You cannot cause an apocalypse. Not right now," told Eii.

Should I have found it hard to believe that it was real? After experiencing too many supernatural things at once, how could I not? If time travel was possible and so were spirits to fly around, it would only be a matter of time till something worse shows up in the midst of the moment.

That day, I realized what they meant when they told me to call them deviated names in order for me not to confuse them with myself.

The corners and curves were of similarity to mine that they profoundly look exactly like me. From the future, Dee's voice rang in my head.

I will become them if I were not to stop what their devilish prediction indicated. I would die and become a wandering ghost. But I hated everything the spirits gave to me. This abilities, this world, this fate... this repulsive life.

If I ran, it meant that it would go the exact way the lingering ghosts annunciated. I couldn't bring myself to know that one mess up in my plan would take me afresh to square one. I had gone a long way and, of course, I wasn't that to give up so easily. Determination and persistence brought me alive and well to this day as I glanced in front of the track field. Even if the wraiths sought every last chance to try and ruin my future for the change and the better world, I'd still never let anything bad happen to me.

Though they're the apparitions who knew how to save me from my perilous time to come forth, I was the only one who could save myself.

The funny thing about life: it knocks you down but encourages you to pick yourself back up. What if I had trouble finding my feet in the midst of chaos? What if I could never get back again?

If there's a will, there's a way. And my only way, as usual, was through lying.

If ever I could lie.

word count: 2663

a/n: I. Am. In. Deep. Thoughts.
This might be long but is it a chapter
worth for a reader to read? 🤔
Heh, I'm probably overthinking.
What do you think?