You know when you wake up and you’re still in a sleeping state? When half of your brain is still kind of sleeping and the other half is awake… semi-conscious! That was the word I was looking for. Anyways I have quite the scary experience with being semi-conscious and I decided to share it. Gotta have a story to tell on campfires, right?
I took another bite from the obsolete pizza that my friends and I ate, I know it’s not good to eat expired food but the expiration date was around three days before we ate it so it was still edible. The reason my friends were there was actually because it was my friend Noah’s 18th birthday and we decided to celebrate it at my place since his parents were divorced and it would just be weird to choose one of his parents’ apartments to have his birthday, right?
We were sitting in my stinky living room and one of my friends started talking about staying up all night and doing something fun, apparently they were all bored of celebrating their friend’s birthday. Anyways, I suggested that we could sleep in my old attic because it could be fun and it’s a much more comfortable temperature to sleep in because it’s colder. I personally don’t like to sleep in hotter temperatures because I just get sweaty.
My friends were all in on the attic idea so we took our quilts and made it up to my attic. Luckily all my friends didn’t have claustrophobia which would have ruined the whole thing. My attic door has stairs which you fold down when you drag the door out from the ceiling. To open it you use a metal rod, put it in the small hole and rotate it which then unlocks the door. The thing is that we didn’t realize that it could be locked from the outside, well if the person who locked us in had the rod. So we just decided to bring it up with us to be safe but my stupid friend Alex went up last and forgot it of course. We were already up there and we were all lazy and tired so we didn’t think that much of it since there’s nobody who’s gonna lock the door while we’re in there, I mean, at least that’s what we thought…
We had everything we needed up in the attic but then I suddenly realized how narrow my attic was, somehow I’ve always thought of it much bigger but that’s probably only because I spent most of my time in the attic when I was younger, which was one of the reasons I suggested we’d sleep there. It was also much colder than I remembered. Our mattresses couldn’t fit up there so we just slept on our quilts, which made it really cold and not a comfortable temperature to sleep in so we wrapped ourselves in with the quilts like burritos so the temperature was no longer a problem.
It was already really late, about 2 o’clock in the morning and we tried our hardest to stay awake. You might think that it would be easy to stay awake but I gotta tell you, it was quite the challenge, at least for our age I guess. We told each other all the good memories we’ve had and everything we’ve gone through together and it kind of started to get emotional. Some of us started crying and said we were lucky to have met each other and that we shouldn’t take each other for granted, I agreed. As soon as I said those two words I fell into a deep sleep or at least that’s how I remembered it.
Some time later I woke up being semi-conscious and noticed that it was 7 o’clock in the morning and all of my friends were still asleep, so I decided to get down to get some food. When I tried to open the door in the floor of my attic, it didn’t open. At first I thought it was just jammed or something but after a few more tries I realized that it was locked. I got so scared I almost peed my pants since I knew there was no other way out of my attic. The semi consciousness disappeared in a fraction of a second and I was wide awake. I realized that we were all stuck and the fear kicked in and I quickly woke my friends in extreme panic.
They all woke up in a shocked state, and screamed in union; “WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM YOU MANIAC!” I answered them with an even louder voice; “WE’RE ALL STUCK UP HERE, THE DOOR IS LOCKED!”. And slightly after that everybody started to put the blame on Alex because he was the bastard that forgot to bring up the metal rod. Then I said; “We’re all missing the real reason we’re stuck up here, someone must have locked us in”.
We all tried opening the door again but it didn’t work, it was really locked. We all sat down again and started contemplating who could have locked us in. The person must have had the key to my house or maybe they just broke in. But we stopped thinking about that and started figuring out our way out of my attic. The only thing we came up with was basically just to destroy the ceiling and then crawl up on the roof.
We all started to look for durable stuff which we could use to break the ceiling. My attic was filled with old things which was why there was no room for our mattresses. Luckily my friend David found a rusty spade. He immediately started hitting the roof with all his force but the damage was almost imperceptible. We all were quite sceptical if we were ever gonna break out of there but we took turns using the spade and hit the ceiling with everything we had.
As it was Noah’s turn with the spade he yelled in a happy voice; “YES, I’M THROUGH, I MADE IT”. We all looked up at the ceiling and saw a small hole. Noah continued to break and destroy the ceiling so that we could fit through. The hole was now big enough for all of us to fit through and we started crawling out and cut our stomachs on the rough edges of the hole as we did.
We all stood up on the roof of my house and saw the gorgeous lake that I lived next to. We got down from the roof and saw that the window next to my red door was completely broken and saw shards of glass in front of it.
Unfortunately, I never found the imbecile that locked us in. I started thinking about why someone would ever do something like that and they must have known we were up in the attic…