“Is this real?” he had asked her. She didn’t know. But the question kept her up that night long after he was gone. Was it real? Her reality had been cosmetic and she no longer dabbled in the deep end of the universe. Experience is a cruel and persistent instructor. Like the slap of a ruler across knuckles, it had in the harshest and swiftest of blows thrown her to the shallow waters. Given her ample reason to believe that she had no business believing in things that drove the poets, artists and musicians mad. 

Hours in the middle of the night turned over into a day and she stared at a mosquito and asked it, “Well, do you know?…was it real?” A mosquito flying around while the heater noisily skyrockets the utility bills! What nerve. While the survival skills of the mosquito impressed her, she couldn’t let it live. She watched it fall to the cold ground and sighed. 

She liked numbers. Numbers and figures are safe. Though many a man has died because of them, it was usually a bad bet or some sort of emotional charge that killed not the numbers themselves. They were rational. They made sense. But as she looked at the mosquito she couldn’t help but think, “are the numbers really real or do we just believe they are and accept that the math makes sense when the truth is we can call a 2 anything and as long we believe it is what we call it, it’s real to us.”