The alarm blared at 5:30 AM, its shrill beep slicing through the stale darkness of Noura's studio apartment. Her hand slapped the snooze button by muscle memory. Three minutes later, it screamed again. This time, she dragged herself upright, her joints stiff from another night spent hunched over her laptop. The glow-in-the-dark stars she'd stuck to her ceiling as a teenager—a relic of simpler days—were barely visible in the predawn gloom.
She stared at them anyway.
"When did I stop looking up?"
—
Noura Adhi was 29 years old, born to a schoolteacher mother and a postal worker father in a Jakarta suburb where dreams were measured by their practicality. At eight, she'd declared she'd become a chef, garnishing her announcement by presenting her parents with a lopsided omelet. Her father had patted her head. Her mother had said, "Cooking doesn't pay bills, Honey."
By 22, she'd buried that dream under a computer science degree.
Now, she worked as a junior project manager at Zenith Interactive, Southeast Asia's third-largest gaming company. Her salary was respectable—enough to lease this apartment, send money home, and buy the occasional overpriced latte. By all accounts, she was fine.
She was also miserably adrift.
—
The office smelled of artificial lemon and burnt coffee. Noura's cubicle was a monument to exhaustion: a half-dead succulent (gifted by HR during "Employee Wellness Week"), a framed photo of her parents at Borobudur (taken three birthdays ago), and a sticky note that read "MAKE MORE TIME TO COOK" in fading ink.
"Late again, huh?" Her colleague Martin smirked as she slumped into her chair. "Boss wanted the QA report by nine."
Noura didn't reply. She'd been here since 11 PM last night. The report had been in his inbox by 2 AM.
The day bled into the same monotonous rhythm: sprint meetings where no one actually ran, Slack pings that felt like taser jolts, and a lunch "break" spent debugging code with one hand while shoveling cold nasi goreng with the other. At 6:03 PM, just as she reached for her bag, her manager's shadow loomed over her desk.
"Crunch time," said Chris, his smile not reaching his eyes. "The Singapore investors moved the deadline."
Noura's phone buzzed. A notification from her cooking app: "You haven't logged a recipe in 47 days."
She silenced it and opened another spreadsheet.
—
Midnight. The office was a ghost town save for the blue glow of Noura's monitor. Her contacts burned like sandpaper against her eyes. Somewhere between the 14th revision of the monetization flowchart and a Slack argument about loot box odds, her body had switched to autopilot.
Just get home. Just sleep.
Rain slicked the roads as she weaved through the city on her scooter. Neon signs blurred into streaks of pink and gold. Her mind wandered to tomorrow's schedule—another 12-hour shift, another meal skipped—when a delivery truck's horn screeched.
Then: light.
Not the harsh fluorescence of the office, but something warmer. Golden. The scent of caramelized shallots and coconut milk wrapped around her like a childhood memory.
"Am I… dead?"
The realization should've terrified her. Instead, Noura laughed—a raw, guttural sound she hadn't made in years. Because for the first time since she could remember, the crushing weight on her chest was gone.
No deadlines. No guilt.
Just… freedom.
And somewhere in that luminous void, a voice whispered:
"Let's try again."