They Are Real

Julia glances about the dark room, frowning in discomfort. “Could someone turn on the light?”

“No,” Francis quips, standing near the sink and playing with a sponge in her hand.

A smirk creeps across my lips. “Pass.”

She grins openly, looking over her shoulder at the other girl. “Who actually wants lighting, anyway?”

Humming, my fuzzy mind draws a blank. “Thomas Jefferson?”

“Uh…” Francis glances over at me, looking confused. “Why him?”

“Wasn’t he the one who invented the light bulb?”

The oddly named girl frowns at me. “Edison, not Jefferson.”

With a shrug, my stare returns to the book in my hand. “Whatever. They’re both named Tommy.”

Julia just stands by the door, looking back and forth between the two of us. If she were smart, she would step back and head for her room, ignore the entire event that has occurred in front of her. But every once in a while, she does something stupid to make us all laugh.

“Why are we talking about founding fathers?”

How she had lost track of our conversation, I can’t quite come up with an idea since I’m laughing alongside Fran. The two of them are my roommates, not exactly on the best of terms with each other. Julia and Fran are actually quite close, to my slight aggravation, so run around doing a number of things together. I, on the other hand, barely know the two past the basics and have trouble getting close to get to know them in any sort of fashion. It has something to do with Fran, I’m certain. She has this tendency to ignore me whenever we’re in the same room and has only really shown concern when it seemed like someone might have needed to drive me to the emergency room. But that’s fine, I suppose, since it’s more appropriate to call me the intruder than them the excluders. They’ve known each other for a little over five years now. My presence only came about because they’re last roommate moved to another city for a job.

This was all a coincidence in which I’m just a person who helps pay the rent.

On a cheerier note to do with them, they at least don’t bug me about having multiples of the same outfit or loving a specific jacket enough to wear it to shreds. Some of my older friends used to give me weird look for buying five pairs of the same exact brand and style of jeans. All at once. It’s not that I don’t like the idea of having different styles, but usually designer crap is uncomfortable so I wind up grabbing the comfiest pair in sight, and multiples of it. Who cares if it seems like my clothes never get washed? Not like anyone ever actually pays attention to the pair of pants you’re wearing, right?

Or, at least, not anyone with a sense of decency and awareness.

“Whatever,” Julia grumbles, finally disappearing like she really should have moment ago.

“Well, we’re going now,” Francis chuckles, striding after Julia toward the front door. “Try not to ruin the place.”

“That was not my fault,” I call after them, fully aware they had stopped paying attention and the door was closed already.

Which happens to be the only downside to being their roommate. Living with another person usually means you should get to know them or something, right? But these two? They’ve stuck to just knowing each other and letting me pay my section of the rent when it’s due. We know the basics about each other, but something tells me that, if someone were to actually ask us all, we would know barely anything about each other. And that I could probably answer more of the questions about them than they could about me. For instance, Julia has a predilection to the bright side of life, and the colors that go with it. She’s got a boyfriend that spoils her regularly – lucky her – and went through private education. If you walked through her room, there would be happy-inducing things everywhere along with a collection of stuffed animals, her favorite being a large lion she named David. Francis, on the other hand, is a bit of an odd-ball painter kind of girl. She’s got a slight obsession with the arts and a natural inclination to anything to do with beauty and what she deems ‘interesting,’ like maybe a strange piggy bank that she made which is supposed to resemble some superhero. Going through her room would probably end with a very heavy concussion and a slight gap in memory.

Really, they shouldn’t be friends whatsoever, but college does weird things to relationships.

Anyway, the two of them have made cameo appearances regularly during a few of the recent visits through my head. It’s a little strange, really, to see my two roommates bouncing around in my head acting very oddly for themselves. Maybe it has something to do with them embodying some other distant prat of my subconscious. That seems to be the running trend for the majority of the figures and people that are playing up there. Whatever the deal, though, I really wish I could get them all to stop making me dream weird things about alligators with party hats, purple scales and spoons for teeth while they watch some indistinct comedy show on a bubble. Those are the creepiest things to dream up, I swear.

Well, they’re gone now, anyway, so no need to really fuss about them, I suppose. Instead, maybe it’s about time to settle in with something from reality. Fictional people in my head are fun and all, but spending too much time going through what is obviously the more insane section of my mind could only be a bad thing. Who want to go crazy from talking to their own self? Letting the less ruined part of my brain stay that way is a very good idea to me.

Thus I find myself in my room, on my bed, as the internet starts to load. And for the first time in what feels like forever, my eyes start to go over little bits of news, stories people tell over chats, a few forums that explain numerous scientific and historical findings and maybe an actual story or two. There’s even a few minutes spent looking through picture on the image section of my search engine. Not that it really means much since I mostly search up basic words and decided to see what the engine gave me for image relations. Some of them were a bit disturbing, quickly skipped over, and a few others had me glancing at web pages.

How odd my life must be if this is how I connect with reality. Through a damn computer screen. Maybe losing my mind isn’t such a bad idea after all. At least it’s more entertaining.