"If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you." -- Friedrich Nietzche

  She did tell me once, " You're my imagination. What else can you possibly be? A ghost? A spirit poetically connected to me? What can you be but my imagination?"

  It seems so counterintuitive and rather, unbearable. I? What exactly am I? She has a history, a narrative on her life. She has family, friends, daily nuisances, even some hardships She's overcome. There are witnesses to her existence.

  And there is she, my possible locus of existence, claims that I am imaginary.

  "Oh, yes........ I am spiraling again."

  I muttered that to myself and rose from my usual place in the park. I grabbed my bicycle and set out again, a journey to the abyss. Should I call it that?

  I know the neighborhood location like she does, even better. I don't have a social life to distract me.

  I tried to get invested in her life, but seriously it's not my thing. Eventually I noticed, I am a believer of aesthetics. The splitting light through the round green leaves, the dim serenity of the afternoon water, the beauty in the puzzle like structure of the colorful houses; They became the things I would notice or explore on my rides. Funny, huh?

  Everything else. Plain void. Nothingness.

  When I reached her house, she was sitting on the chair with both of her hands neatly placed on the armrest. She was wearing a purple colored overall with a black neckline. Her eyes were calm yet suffocating. This time, I had to break the silence.

  "How was your day?"

  "Mediocre, yours?"

  "Same I guess"

  I did not make eye contact for my next sentence.

  " I just can't settle down."

  "About yourself?"

  "Am I really a self-aware imaginary being, who magically got consciousness? It sounds like nonsense."

  "What is it that you call imaginary, Rose?"

  Yes. Rose, that is my name. I forgot, since nobody almost uses it. I thought a little to myself. It has hardly a non-ambiguous answer.

  "An unreal fantasy? Not really, more like anything that in its essence has to be unreal."

  "And what is it that you call real?"

  "Reality is perception. If it interacts with others and others interact with it in a tangible way, it has to be real. I don't think anything else can't be but that is the guarantee that it is."

  "Can thoughts be real?"

  "They are abstract"

  "Does abstract things exist?"

  "Yes, I don't think reality and existence had to be the same."

  I paused. I realized it was indeed a horrific possibility that I am what she thinks I am. Me having existence has never guaranteed my reality. Is that it then? Am I supposed to feel something with this realization. I think I perhaps had a similar conversation just a month ago. My memories are diluted with so much doubt and questions, it's hard to distinguish.

  " Tell me about when it all started then!"

  "I have already told you many times. Once, I got an idea, what if I had an imaginary friend who is self-aware, and there you were."

  "Listen to yourself, does it even make sense?"

  I paused. I needed some space to be prepared for this kind of conversation.

  " I am going to the rooftop."

  " I know"

  Why she had to reply with that phrase so often, though? Why can't she just nod or say yes. Perhaps because she knows. She knows the origin of my dreadful whole. I am not going to buy her low-effort fantasy.

  I am not in denial, in case, she is going to spin it back to it. There's actually a perfect reason I suspect her.

  Come to think of it, I am not some ghostly being that can stick around her and keep an eye around her, not independently. The mechanism is perfectly biased. I can only go where she allows me to. That much is clear. And it feels very natural too. Like my foundation is not to do what she doesn't want me to. And I've never been to her diary, or her workplace. Perhaps because......Her lease doesn't permit me there.

  Too good a reason not to blame her.