my imaginary friend saves my life on the regular

I lived in an unpleasantly run-down house in a third-world country with my younger brother, and my parents, who were missionaries. My entire peer group had moved away in the space of six months, leaving me the only fifteen-year-old in our community.

Since only seven children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen remained, the co-op school neglected to hire a teacher to cover our grades, leaving our parents to negotiate their own means. Mine enrolled me in an online school, conducted via online chat and screensharing -- I never saw my classmates' or my teachers' faces. My parents were quite preoccupied with their mutual work, so that the family rarely ate together or spoke except for purely practical reasons. I was terrifically lonely.

No one noticed how late I stayed up, or how late I slept in, or whether I did my homework or attended class or ate regularly. I ate a lot of chocolate -- a bar of dark chocolate a day, sometimes -- and read every book in my collection over and over again, trying to become the characters, and have their problems, which were always solved by the end of the series. I ate toast when I was hungry, because when the power was on it was easy to make. I cried a lot. Some nights, about two in the morning, I'd walk around the silent house and the courtyard in the dark, too miserable to sit still or to sleep or to read. I remember looking up at the sky through the grapevines on the arbor and wondering if this was rock bottom, if I could possibly feel worse.

Well, I could.

long text post under the cut

For most species, bared teeth are a threat, even on earth. So it shouldn’t be very surprising that most alien species tend to respond poorly to a human smiling at them. Humans who spend a lot of time around aliens do their best to train themselves out of the habit, adopting (as much as they are physically capable) the expression of enjoyment used by whatever species they socialise with most. But it’s really hard not to smile when you see another human… Harder still not to smile back when one smiles at you. This leads to the common misapprehension that humans generally don’t get along with strangers.

When, by whatever series of events, a crew or team with a human member acquires an additional human or two, the atmosphere gets tense for a few cycles while the nonhumans wait for some kind of establishment of hierarchy to take place. Some humans humor the assumption and perform a mock battle in some public area - these are generally those who have encountered the scenario before and became tired of trying to explain.

Rap battles, trivia contests, simple sports matches and other activities that a human would recognise as popular recreational activities often feature in these dominance rituals. The participants find that the performance serves as a great ice breaker and so the practice is becoming increasingly common. It is likely, therefore, that the misinformation about human social strata will persist.

The boy kneeled on the edge of his bed and leaned forward and down until he was looking under his bed in an upside-down sort of way. He wondered if that meant he was now looking on top of the bed, but figured that couldn't be the case. There were no monsters immediately apparent under the bed, but there was a quite large dust bunny hunched on the wooden floor among the toys. It drifted over closer, across the creaky old boards without a sound, to where the boy peered at it with the blood rushing to his head, and made a very slight scuffly sort of noise. "Any monsters tonight?" he asked. The dust bunny's whole wispy body shook in what was probably a no. "Good," said the boy, and sat back up on top of the bed and curled up and went to sleep to the pale glow of his dinosaur nightlight.

by rawl

It was always gloomy at his workplace, but tomorrow was Saturday and he had the day off. He decided to lay in the sun. He lay in the sun all day. "What the hell were you thinking?" his doctor demanded as he scrawled a signature across the prescription form. "This is the worst sunburn I've ever seen!" Worth it, thought the man. He gingerly slumped in his chair and closed his eyes. On the backs of his eyelids the sun still burned in all its glory, like a hole in the sky letting through a peek of heaven in all its intolerable beauty.

by rawl