#tdoos

A few days ago, Ben said he wanted to tell his boyfriend about the shadow people. He hadn’t told me he had a boyfriend, and that kinda pissed me off. Not because I’m mad that he’s gay or anything, in case it wasn’t clear in my last entry I have two dads (though I call one Appa), but rather that Ben is literally my only friend and if there’s some he can be friends with I would also like to be friends with them. They met online, living too far away to meet up in person, so I guess that’s why Ben didn’t tell me about him. I’m not too keen on internet friends. I met him the following day, learnt that his name is Riley, he lives in Sarnia but he’s going to be moving to study computer engineering at York University in September, while Ben and I are taking a year off to do our personal studies on the shadow people. Riley seems like a nice guy, maybe a little too rational to believe in shadow people, but if he’s going to be hanging out with Ben so much, he’s going to have to know about the shadow people, so I told him. I wasn’t expecting him to look at me in horror and say in disbelief, “You can see them too?”

Turns out Riley has schizophrenia, so he assumed the shadow people were just another hallucination, even though they were his only visual hallucination and, like my experience, didn’t match up with what visual hallucinations are supposed to be like. But, since he already had confirmed auditory hallucinations, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume he was having visual ones as well. There is, of course, the fact that they interact with the real world occasionally, but he never said his experiences with that, as we had to end the video call early when Daiyu, one of my two younger sisters, walked in and demanded that I helped her with her homework. I don’t mind helping her out.

Ben ended up giving me Riley’s phone number. We mostly compare notes about the shadow people.

Robert had suggested I try talking to the shadow people, see if they can speak or listen. I tried with the one that follows me a lot, asked them who they are. I can’t tell if they heard me, but they didn’t reply. I tried speaking to one that wasn’t already looking at me and was one of the ones that like to follow Ben around. It turned to face me, but only for a moment, before returning to looking at Ben.

Also, I realized I forgot to mention their mimicking tendencies in my previous entry. Sometimes, when someone is doing something, a shadow person will copy them. I watched one copy Lin on the monkey bars. I guess I should probably mention that Lin and Daiyu are twins. I don’t know if shadow people react differently to twins. I have no reason to believe they would, but stories always talk about how twins are special, so I’m always on the lookout.

The shadow person that follows me around has begun to push things off counters and shelves and such if I ignore them for too long. I think they’ve been hanging out with Jimothy too much.

Oh, and one more thing. Riley says that he’s heard the shadow people scream. I have reason to doubt the validity of this, as he says he has scream hallucinations, but these screams apparently sound different, apparently, they sound less real somehow. Furthermore, he says that the screaming shadow person will jut their chest out and look up to the sky. He has only seen it happen twice but has heard it 5 times. Considering I’ve never heard it, I don’t entirely believe him.