Eternal Autumn's Coda

How do you know they're real? That was usually the first thing he wrote down in his journal entries. This time was no different. He sat in the same rickety chair, in front of the same old desk, writing in the same old notebook, that he had written in for the past three years. It was nearing the end of spring but he couldn't tell past the dark green curtains that never let light in. To him, it was eternal fall but he didn't care. All he cared about was the question, are they real?

The boy always wondered, when he was younger, he thought he knew the answer until his friend turned out to be one of those people that saw people that were not real, and that made the boy wonder if he was like that too. He had wondered for many years now and yet he could not find an answer. His thin fingers tapped at the desk as if the rhythmic thumping of flesh against wood would help him think. He came out of this thought process again, empty handed. For one barely in their twelve years of school, the boy was not preoccupied with what he would wear or where he would go after the school day was over and what kind of trouble he would get into with his friends to create memories that one would look back on in twenty years and think fondly of them. No, the boy only cared about one thing, reality not just in the reality of those around him but the reality of himself. He cared about finding out if he, himself was real and not just the figment of someone else's imagination. He wondered days at a time that if he was not real then maybe the person that conjured him would realize what they were doing and perhaps he would fade away as they did. At the end of his thought process, he faded away in the old rickety chair as he had done so many times before.

The boy's mother woke him the next morning yelling about the food and school and some other things he could not hear. The boy, however, heard a set of small, mischievous footsteps scurrying down the stairs almost as fast as a pair of horses racing at the derby. That was an indication that it was a quarter past seven and he would soon have to go to school and see people that might not even exist, the boy pondered whether or not to feign an illness but in the end decided against it.