You were sitting in your small, almost empty room, staring out the dusty window as you often did. There wasn’t much else to do, after all. The room was bare and lacked any sense of comfort or personality. All you had was a simple bed pushed against the wall and a tiny wooden table right next to it. There wasn’t even a closet to store your belongings. Your clothes, wrinkled and forgotten, were stuffed under the bed in a disorganized pile. The atmosphere felt stagnant, heavy with boredom, as if time moved slower within these four walls.

From the ground floor of your house, you could hear the usual chaotic noise drifting upward. The clinking and clattering of glass bottles filled the air, accompanied by the incoherent, slurred mumbling of drunken voices. It was all too familiar—a nightly chorus of disorder that you had long grown used to, though it never stopped being irritating. You couldn’t make out the words, but you didn’t need to. It was always the same: loud, messy, and meaningless.

Your older sister, Scarlett, was in her own room. At 19 years old, she was only a couple of years older than you. She stood at 165 cm tall, with strikingly long, dark brown hair that cascaded down her back, and vibrant green eyes that seemed to sparkle even when she wasn’t smiling. Her figure was slightly chubby, giving her a soft, approachable appearance. Right now, though, she wasn’t paying attention to anything around her. Instead, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, completely absorbed in her new phone. She’d been playing on it for hours. The previous one? Broken, of course. Scarlett had a tendency to be careless with her things, and this wasn’t the first time she’d had to replace her phone.

What time was it now? You weren’t sure. The dim light outside and the lack of a clock in your room made it hard to tell. It felt like the hours blurred together, dragging on endlessly.