Daniel Weston

For as long as I remembered, I had always been bedridden. You see, I was originally an unwanted child. My parents tried hard to abort me, but they failed because I was such a resilient embryo. Unfortunately, the harmful medication ended up harming me after all and causing me to be born sickly. Or at least that was what I believe because I would never find out the real truth.

Fourteen years ago, a baby was dumped in the dark corridor at the backside of a burger restaurant. That was me. I was put inside a cardboard box, naked and scared. I cried for hours but no one noticed me.

Maybe it was because the nearby street was so loud with laughing and chatting passersby. Who had time for me? And then, through a single stroke of luck, someone finally noticed me. It was a waitress from the burger restaurant. She just finished her shift and was throwing out trash bags to the back corridor. Imagine her fright when she heard me whimpering in the darkness. It was scary. She thought that I was a ghost. She actually went back into the restaurant in a fit of panic before she gathered her courage and went back outside to take a look at me. This time this was the truth because she told me herself.

That was how I met my adoptive mother for the first time in my life.

My adoptive mother was such a weird person. Of all babies she could fall in love with, she fell in love with the sickly me who was lying inside a box and placed in a dumpster. She took me back home immediately and fed me. There was no baby food at home and she tried to feed me some porridge. When I started crying and spitting everything out, she ran to a nearby convenience store to buy some milk.

My adoptive father was a regular office worker who came back late that night because he worked overtime. I can only imagine the look on my adoptive father's face when he found an unknown baby under his roof that night. My adoptive parents just got married two days prior. Unless he accidentally entered a time loop and arrived in the future, he could not imagine how this strange child ended up appearing out of nowhere in his house. Men don't look favorably upon strange babies who their women bring back home randomly. Just saying. In case some of you are wondering.

Anyway, my adoptive father ended up falling in love with me as well. He said that I was the cutest baby he had ever seen. Psh. He was twenty-three years old at that time. How many babies had he seen in his whole life? What a lie. Still, he never strayed from the lie and kept repeating it. It stuck so deep in my heart that I thought it to be the truth. Why else did he keep saying it? He did not need an excuse to make me stay with them. I did.

I had a rough start in life and did not have a smooth life afterward either. I did not have any chronic illness. Guys, come on. How could I have a chronic illness since childhood? No children are born with chronic illnesses. Wait, scratch that. Never mind. Anyway, I did not have any chronic illness. I was merely born with a weak constitution. Being left outside as an infant in naked condition did not help, guys. Note that down. Okay, where was I? Right. My unsmooth life and weak constitution. I kept going in and out of hospitals due to very trivial illnesses like fever, cold, and cough attacks. I swear, most pediatricians if not all pediatricians in town knew me. Eventually, the trivial illness wore my immune system down and made my body extremely vulnerable to every seasonal change.

When my parents finally conceived and had my little brother, I was the happiest person in the world. You might think that this did not make sense, but let me tell you why it was the truth. I was dying. I was dying and I knew that. My body became weaker and weaker with every passing day. The days when I went to school became fewer and fewer until I finally stopped going altogether. The days also became shorter and shorter because I slept so much. Effect of medication, you see.

How was this a good thing? I had yet to repay my adoptive parents for their kindness but I did not even have the opportunity to do that! Thus I selfishly pinned all my expectations on my little brother. I wanted him to take my place. So that when I finally died, my adoptive parents would not be too sad. They would still have my brother. And hey, he was their real child! They had to love him more!

It was still a miracle though that I managed to reach the age of fourteen. Pity that I spent 80% of my life in bed, missing out on the largest part of life. Or maybe not? In the last three years, I had been especially interested in playing MMORPGs. I quickly became addicted to the virtual fantasy life and played day and night whenever I was awake. I played at home, and I played at the hospital. My latest addiction was "Afterlife Dream", an MMORPG with the concept of reincarnation into a fantasy world after death. The game was good, but what really attracted me was the concept. It would be great to be reincarnated into a game after death, don't you think?

A week ago, I was hospitalized due to pneumonia. It was not that bad, really. Not after you had spent years suffering from similar symptoms. I would not have minded staying at home as always to nurse my weak and frail body, but my parents, bless them, were such worrywarts. I was dragged to the hospital despite my strong protests.

Whenever I was lucid, I grabbed my tablet and played Afterlife Dream. I diligently did my dailies and upgraded my gears. I made plans to go on raids with my guildmates. I paid attention to my stats and skill point distribution meticulously. MMORPG had become, well, my life.

My little brother Jaden was twelve years old at that time. He loved me dearly and I loved him equally if not more. My type of pneumonia was not contagious so he came to visit me every day after school. Other than playing MMORPGs, I liked chatting with him about school the most. He liked playing baseball and swimming. He was quite good. He won some regional swimming competitions and brought some medals home. My cute little brother never understood why I was so engrossed in playing MMORPGs. He often said that was not real. It was fake. And that I was wasting my precious time on stupid virtual interactions. I did not bother to argue and just laughed it off.

Oh, my sweet, sweet brother.

Just because it was not real, who said that it was not considered a life? MMORPG world was the only world where I am healthy. I could do anything I wanted to do. The sky was the limit. It was cruel to tell me that the only good form of life I had was not real.

This kind of thing, he would surely not understand it.

I was happy that he did not get it because then it meant that his life was good enough. He did not have the need to escape into a "fake life".

It happened on that night in the middle of August. My parents came by as usual to kiss me good night and picked my brother up to go home. My mother stroked my hair and wished me sweet dreams. My father bought me some gaming magazines to look at. I thanked them both with a smile. After they left I closed my eyes to sleep, never to wake up again.