Okay but I can't stop thinking about this.
How this wouldn't be a name they chose for themselves, it's just what they were dubbed and it stuck. How they were close enough to all call each other by their given names, but to everybody else they were just 'those idiots'.
How they must have been called that so often. How their classmates saw them as a collective unit rather than three individual people. How there must have been students in other classes who didn't even know their names outside of 'those three idiots'.
How their classmates must have been so used to seeing all three of them together that if they ever saw just one, they always knew the other two were nearby. How strange their classmates must have found it when all three of them didn't get an internship at the same agency.
How nobody would have known what to do or how to address them anymore once there were suddenly only two of them.
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I'm not sure how weird of a question it would be to ask, or if it's one i should ask, but if you could choose to hallucinate one of them again without any kind of drawbacks just to talk with them, would you? And who would you talk to?
Not a weird question at all, and it's one I've actually asked myself a lot over the years! If I were able to hallucinate one of my old Brain Roommates™️ again, but without the intense anxiety that is required for me to hallucinate in the first place or the actual damage to my brain that hallucinations do, I'd be very, very interested in it. However, my answer for who I would speak to in this hypothetical scenario has changed throughout the years.
Originally, I wanted to talk to the Black Clock. He was the most consistently distressing hallucination, and was a sort of manifestation of my intense perfectionism and high standards for myself. I wanted to ask him if I was enough. It was a question that haunted me for years, and either answer scared me. If I was enough, then that meant I wasn't living up to my potential and that I was "sinful, irredeemable filth" according to the script I told myself back then. If I wasn't enough, then I didn't deserve anything good and I was an active blight on all that I loved, somehow. Nowadays I don't have anything to say to him. I'm enough for myself and I'm enough for God. The opinion of some misfiring synapses doesn't matter.
After that, I wanted to speak to the Red Woman. She expressed remorse after I found my first set of medications that partially stopped me from hallucinating, and she apologized for what she put me through and told me goodbye. I held her the night I took those medications while she cried and said she was scared to die. I never saw or heard from her again, at least as a hallucination. I wanted to tell her I forgave her and that I hoped she was okay, wherever she was. I don't have that same anxiety over the speculative mortality of the voices in my head anymore, so I wouldn't say I would want to talk to her again. There's not much point to it in my eyes. She hurt me and said she was sorry. That's a full sentence. I don't need to open it up for anything else.
Later on, I wanted to talk to the Lime Hands because, in a very bizarre exchange, he expressed to me he was depressed and didn't want to exist. I wanted to see if he was feeling any better, as strange as it was to ask that of a hallucination. Now, though, I hate that freak and make no apologies for what the dang thing put me through, and the only way I'd want to reunite with him is in some wonderland scenario where I could tangibly interact with him. And that's only because I'm punching that sucker's teeth in and breaking his pinky fingers.
As for the present day answer: If I were to choose any of my hallucinations to speak to without consequence, I think I'd like to speak to Doc Brown, or the Marigold Girl.
Doc Brown was the most cordial of the hallucinations and actually stepped in to advocate for me on occasion when the pain was really bad. I liked him a lot. He was a friend to me when I had very few people to talk to. We joked together and he gave me advice and words of comfort during some of the worst nights of my life. I think it'd be fun, in a very surreal way, to catch up with him— ask him how he's doing, how he's been, if he and the Marigold Girl are still buddies and if the Red Woman and him ever got over the hump of their flirtatious hatred for each other and actually became an item. It'd be a nice little send off to the guy. He was one of the first hallucinations I stopped experiencing, and his disappearance was very abrupt. I'd like to be able to say goodbye properly, thank him for his help, and smile and kindly say I hope I never see him again.
(also, the guy's whole shtick was anxiety over disease / contamination and the possibility of me infecting others with whatever bug I caught at the time. I stopped hallucinating him WAY before 2020 and I think he would lose his mind if I told him about COVID-19. That was his time to shine and he missed it. Poor thing.)
The Marigold Girl was a very difficult figure for me to handle when I was hallucinating. On the one hand, she was a lovely, if somewhat unsettling, little girl. She liked it when I read books and explained the plots to her. She always wanted to be held. She was scared of the dark. She adored my stuffed animals and would whisper to them while I was trying to sleep. I enjoyed being around her for the most part, but she was a very weepy hallucination, and the Black Clock would deal out punishment without fail whenever she cried— it was always my fault somehow, and so I suffered the consequences of her being a bit of a crybaby.
Looking back, I feel bad for her. She was a good kid, or at least as good of a kid as an unhealthy cocktail of neurochemicals in a weary brain can be. She once said she didn't want to cry all the time and wished she knew how to stop because I got in trouble because of it. I think it would be nice to comfort her and tell her it wasn't her fault that I'd be hurt. She couldn't control things anymore than I could back then.
I'd really like to show her the new stuffed animals I've collected over the years and read her one of the short stories I've written. I think she'd like Winter Came and Went if she didn't have to worry about the consequences of crying during the sad parts. She'd definitely enjoy Bibbidy Bee Goes to the Library. If possible, I'd like to ask what her favorite color is. I think she'd have a lot of fun answering, and I'd like being able to get to know this part of my psyche that was scared to let herself show any sadness for fear of hurting others with it.
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