It feels as if none of it is real. The clinking of spoons, the constant buzzing of all the conversations taking place around me, the steam from the coffee machine - none of it is real. This is all something I've made up, I'm living in my imagination, trapped in it. I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how to get out. All of the people around me, the lively debaters, the anti-social pit-patter on keyboarders, the middle-aged bald man having coffee with his wife who keeps pausing to look up from his newspaper to stare at me - they're all figments of my imagination. They're all strangers I have passed in the street and am now unintentionally recreating in this dreamworld café.
I am dreaming. None of this is real. It makes sense. That is why the lights are too bright and the noise is too loud and my head hurts and the edges of my vision are blurry and it's ALL. TOO. MUCH. As I think this, I stare at the pen between my fingers and the paper beneath my pen, and I wonder whether or not those are real. I wonder about my words. Are they real? I do not know. What does it mean to be real? If I write something and no-one reads it, does that mean it is not real? If I say something and no-one heats it, is my speech any less than real? If I live intensely in my dreams and never wake up...am I real?
I stop writing. I lift my head. I stare at the three pictures of an Italian villa which adorn the wall behind the bald man's head. Suddenly I realise that I am wrong. The bald man is real. The rude man who did not end his phone conversation to order an Americano is real. The young lovers cuddling in the corner are completely and utterly real. I am the one who isn't.
I am the impostor. I am the false one. I look back down at my hands and wonder how I have never before noticed their translucent quality. Glowing, pale, shimmering as they let through light. The bald man has changed seats, moved closer. His wife is no longer there. I am not flesh and bone. I am immaterial. The wife returns. My limbs are the consistency of vegetable broth. I scream.
