4.00 am

The short novella 4.00 am was inspired by a 2011 Korean series entitled Always. Some of it, not all of it. For one there’s no pitiful blind damsel in distress or even a washed out boxer. It’s a story I wrote during Covid in my head, but it took a while to put it all on paper simply because the plot in my head kept changing and changing and changing. Eventually it solidified into something that I felt was just right.

Excerpt:

“Some people say life is like a wheel that turns and turns, but for me it’s hard to know whether we turn it or maybe we are all just taking a ride on something that has always turned since the beginning of time. Let me share with you how it all started. I found myself waking up at around three at the dead of night. At first it started sporadically, then it became something regular. It didn’t matter what time I slept. Or how spent I was. I always found myself wide awake at around 3. When it first happened, I tried to get back to the routine of forcing myself back to sleep again, but soon it became clear to me all that I had managed to do was to prove that my bed was a sort of spring board, the harder I forced it, the harder it pushed me right back to full consciousness. I gave up. Had too. It was simply too debilitating to fight it. Just around that period I decided to sign up into a 24 hour gym. I figured if my day is going to start at 3, then it made absolutely no sense not to hit the gym at around 4.00. Besides it suited me. I am not into crowds. Not into noise either. 4.00 suited me. I liked the hour and how it gave the streets an almost eiree desolation as I walked 15 minutes from where I stayed to the gym. It wasn’t a fancy place. Just a place with free weights, a couple of treadmills and a water cooler that was always dry. But at 4.00, no one was usually around and that gave it wispy calm like how morning fog would hover over some desolate field in some picture postcard that stuck like chewing gum somewhere at the back of my head. I did mostly deadlifts and chin ups followed by a half hour salutory run on the threadmill. Yes, salutory is the right word I reckon. As my limbs could never seem to move fast enough to cover the distance between remembering and memory. To me my runs at 4.00 weren’t just runs, they were a sort of allegory between a deep yearning to remember again, and coming to the terms with the idea, there were still other things that had since been lost. You think. No you believe it can never happen to you losing a chunk of who you are. It happened about two years ago when I got mugged. Hit my head real hard against the pavement and since then I’ve been picking up pieces to fit some jig saw puzzle. There are times when I say to myself, maybe you’re just blowing spit bubbles. After all who in their right frame of mind constructs a make belief temple from your daily runs on the threadmill at 4.00, until she appeared one morning. One look. That’s all it took and I knew deep down in the marrow of bones we were both honorary card carrying members of the damaged goods club. Yes, that’s all it take sometimes, no words needed, no gestures of cosy insiderism, its got to be a vampire thing. Just one look like two stray cats turning a corner and pausing momentarily and simply knowing that the person standing before us knows only too well the story isn’t in words, it’s in the perpetual struggle to understand most of life is just a chronicle of chance interactions, of flukes, or random events just like that night two years ago when I took a wrong turn and banged my head on the pavement. I knew it and so did she. Otherwise who in the right mind turns up in the gym at 4.00 in the dead of the morning..who?

This e-book will be released in Ekunaba on 26 March 2026.