In the end, it was all made up.

Every single last bit of it was all made up-the trolls, their ancestors, Bec, Jack Noir. The only real thing about it was your friends, your only friends, Rose, Jade, and Dave. It started out as a simple fantasy. A couple drawings in your notebooks at school. That was all. You drew yourself alone, as usual, talking to your friends online and waiting for a game to come in the mail. You drew during class, when you sat alone in your corner of the classroom when all the other kids in your class grouped up and laughed together. You wanted to feel happy, too. You wanted to laugh with your friends, too. But they were in different parts of the word, thousands of miles away from you. So you drew them instead.

You talked to them online when you got home. Upon returning home, you'd drop your bag and go straight up to your room, eager and with only a few words exchanged to your loving father. You'd go straight on the computer and chat with Rose, Jade, and Dave. You'd tell them great things, great lies. You'd talk about your friends at school, when in reality you have no friends at school, but you like to pretend you do, because it makes you seem less lame. You joke about stuff a lot. You laugh with them. You've known them a long time. They make the loneliness go away.

And then one month your computer breaks. That month is the worst of your life. You've always been a strange boy, you suppose. Emotional, disconnected, clingy, as close to living in your imagination as you can be without actually doing so. Your father tells you he'll get it fixed ASAP, but the company is slow. You sleep. A lot. And when you sleep, you dream. Your dreams take place in an entire new world. Your friends are there-Rose, Jade, and Dave, and the drawings you're now doing more frequently in your notebooks come to live in your dreams. You sleep all day. Sometimes you even tell your dad you're sick so you won't have to go to school. You like dreaming, because in your dreams, you're not lonely and pathetic. You're the person you tell your friends you are! You're funny and cool (by your standards, not Dave's, of course!) and nothing ever bothers you! You're perfect!

Your computer still wasn't fixed, so you keep on drawing. Every day you sit in the dark and draw and draw and write conversations between you and your friends. Your dad tries to talk to you, but you hardly ever say anything back. Instead, he always makes sure you have things to draw with. One day you hear him talking to someone on the phone about getting you 'checked out'. That day you shut yourself in your room and didn't come out until he brought your computer back the next day. That night you stayed up all night on webcam with all your friends. You showed them your drawings. You told them your stories. Dave said they were cool and that your stories were the best shit and he would actually read them if you put them in a book. Rose gave you suggestions on writing and drawing. Jade thought they were really neat and asked if you were going to make more. You felt happy for the first time in a month.

Time went on. You turned thirteen on April thirteenth. Dave's Bro drove Dave down and you two had the best birthday party ever. After he left, though, you couldn't seem to shake the feeling of loneliness again. You realized your friends were just in the computer. You couldn't actually hug them. You couldn't actually do things with them. So, you thought, what if you all could be together? What if you all could play a really fun game that made all of the other mean people in the world disappear? And what if that game could bring you all together? You started dreaming about it at night. You started coming up with a bunch of crazy plots about this imaginary game. And you wrote it all down. And then you drew it.

You weren't the best artist, but you could get by. The little characters sort of looked like you and your friends, and people could get the general idea of what was going on from the pictures. All your friends really liked the pictures and liked to read the stories. You liked to read them to your friends during webcam chats. It was fun.

Then there was a man who came to your house one day. Your father introduced him. You didn't remember his real name, but you knew immediately that he was a therapist. The only big thing you remember about him was that his van had a bumper sticker of a cat on it. You hated him. You wouldn't talk to him. So you wrote him into your story and named him Karkat Vantas and made him the meanest character. Dave got a good laugh out of his name. Rose suggested that it sounded like something related to the astrological symbol for Cancer. You decided that was a good idea.

As time went on, the man visited more and you started to like him more. You decided to make Karkat a bit nicer. You added in other people, too, like the psychologist at school, some bullies from school, the neighbors, and assigned them each an astrological zodiac symbol and a name relating to it. You got more and more absorbed in your own little world. You grew incredibly distant from everything except your friends, to the point where in school; you would simply stare out the window and never even make a mark on your test. Your stories and drawings overtook your life. Your dad worried, but you shut him out. You slept all the time, dreaming for inspiration, and wrote and draw. You truly, sincerely, began to believe it was real.

It was real to you-every single little bit of it. You, John Egbert, lived in an imaginary world and had no idea what was fake and reality. When people did bad things to you, you killed them off, and you actually believed they were dead. The reality everyone else lived in became fictional, while your imagination became reality. The only people you talked to were Jade, Rose, and Dave. No one else. You sat in your dark room, scribbling away, typing to your friends, the room barren. It wasn't barren to you, though. You saw other worlds, other things. And you were never lonely again because you had so many friends and even a sister! You loved it.

So many times people tried to reach out to you. Your dad, your therapist, even some kids at school. You were a lost cause. No one could reach you. You didn't even see their world anymore.

In the end, it was all made up.

But to you it was the most real thing you'd even seen.

Happy 4/13!