29. (Non-non-fiction.)

He came barging into our house at precisely 7:00 pm. Dark blonde pony-tail, blue-grey eyes, short and slim and generally of small build. I was disturbed slightly by how worried, annoyed, angered, and slightly-crazy the young man seemed. I was slightly more disconcerted by the fact that he barged in via not a door or window or something functional like that, but through thin air itself. I was even more freaked out by the fact that he was me.

I looked myself over. I looked right back at me, and tried to catch my breath. We looked at ourselves for a while. We were both pretty confused about the whole situation I seemed to be in.

"What happened?" I asked myself.

"I don't really know," I replied.

"Am I real?" Obviously this was getting a little too confusing for my sleep-addled mind.

"Of course I am. The question is, am I real?"

"That's who I meant. Me."

"That's who I meant. Me."

This was all getting rather silly. "Hang on," I said to myself. And then I turned everything I said red.

"See, this is a lot more convenient," I said. "Thanks for making the change."

"Any time," I replied. "No, want to talk about why I'm here? The me who just appeared in thin air, I mean. Me."

"The convenience of the red lettering has its limits, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"A better question would be how I did the coloring thing in the first place. I mean, it seems a little odd to talk in red text."

I sighed and buried my face in my hands. Attaching such a color to my speech was only adding more complications to our ability to communicate. "Look, you've got to be here for a reason--oh, what the hell is this?" My text had turned blue spontaneously.

"I wanted to know if I could do it, too. I guess it makes sense that I can, since I can."

"This is really stupid."

"Yes it is."

"No, I mean--the color, me nancy."

I laughed at myself. "That doesn't even make any sense!" I said. "I sound like caveman!"

"See, this is much better." We were both getting distracted. "How is it that we can do this?"

"I don't really know."

"Oh, now you're just showing off," I snapped. And then, without thinking, I punched my own lights out. As I fell, I hit my head on the table and poofed out of existence in a shower of dark-red text.

"Oh," I muttered, returning things to their normal hue, "Now I've got a mess to clean up."