Missing Rent

Missing Rent

My mentor Ben, confronted my roommate Steve over missing rent as I fussed with my tea. They sat at our kitchen table and conversed over empty plates which may or may not have been used for their afternoon meal. In fact, it’s safe to say they were not as the lead content in the bone glass would have caused them to enter a state of paralytic psychosis. And so on. What I mean to say, and so I will with safeguarded intentions, is that the plates were not used for their afternoon meal.

Know this: both my mentor Ben, and roommate Steve are staggeringly similar. Exact duplicates in every way. Except they don’t share the same name. Another distinguishing factor of my mentor Ben and roommate Steve is their lack the similar parentage. Of this, I am sure. In fact, they have several subtle differences which I failed to notice until they sat at the kitchen table to discuss the missing rent. I will tell you exactly one. Steve’s face is not Ben’s face, the same way Ben’s face is neither Steve’s nor mine and neither of them pulses tea from excited dribbles of lust from needle thin lips. I do.

With these differences of names, parents, faces, and tea, I can recall with object clarity they are in fact not the same personages. Secretly, I peered under the kitchen table as they argued and discovered neither own matching birthmarks. Or any marks at all, for our matters.

I accept, the possibility they are not sitting at our kitchen table, or discussing missing rent, and perhaps they’re not even real since their parents lack existence because all that sits here is you and I, both hunched over these dim screens of ours, and you should understand my certainty and lack of kitchen table, besides, I doubt I am with you, arguing the politics of missing rent as tea dribbles along our chins in sluggish bulbs of ripe phlegm.

I have already departed. These words are my ghost.

So. If none of us are here, where are you?

How long until you too cease existing?