Me, Myself and Tyler.

Sitting on my bench, eyes half closed and droplets of drool threatening to fall out of my mouth any second, I hear Tyler’s voice. “This is how you spend a quarter of your day?” he asks. I look to my right and see Tyler gaping at me like I’m a science specimen.

I know Tyler isn’t really there. But that doesn’t help much. Or maybe it does. I don’t know anymore.

In the distance, I hear the lecturer. Shannon – Weaver, Laswell’s theory. I couldn’t care less. Tyler continues talking. Resurrection, enlightenment. “There is no purpose in life”, he tells me.

Tyler, an imaginary fiction of my mind, tells me I have no purpose in life. Shannon – Weaver is the mother of all communication models. The world is filled with people who are not brave enough to kill themselves.

My mind was doing its best to process an interesting cocktail of information. The world is filled with models who are not brave enough to kill themselves. People are the mother of all communication.

Tyler is always telling me how my 20 year life has amounted to nothing. He isn’t even grateful that I created him. Beside me, a classmate has fallen asleep. “It’s not just you, though. You are no short of company in this aspect”, Tyler tells me.

I don’t know how and why Tyler started appearing. I always knew he wasn’t there. Not really, anyway. Maybe it was just a way of me talking to me. Shannon was affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The only Shannon I wanted to know about was a soft-porn actress.

Sitting in a class of 60-odd people, listening to lectures that could never help me in my life, I couldn’t help but agree with Tyler. Not about the “kill-themselves” bit, but the “purpose-in-life”. Oh! Wait…

Flip. And I’m listening to crap about newspapers and their advertisers.

Flip. And I’m watching a documentary about farmer suicides.

Flip. And I’m drinking tea in the canteen.

If my life was a TV channel, nobody would be watching it. Flip.

“You could learn more sitting at home all day”, Tyler says. Stop talking, the lecturer says to me. Can she hear Tyler? “Half these idiots don’t even know what the Holocaust is. Hitler should have killed the imbeciles.”

Flip. Flip. Flip. And I’m listening to someone talking about how there is nothing to talk about. Sometimes, I wonder who is real, Tyler or me. Never stop talking, even though there is nothing to talk about.Would I know if I weren't real?

Flip. And I’m home. Flip. And I’m in college. No wonder reality shows are such a bore.

Every time you sneeze, some of your brain cells die. I know this, because Tyler knows this. Maybe people these days are sneezing too much. Like someone said, I miss those days when people were smart and phones were dumb.

This is a semi-fictional story based on myself. The story (intentionally) has no specific structure or message. And if you haven’t realised, it is a tribute to the book (and later, a movie) “Fight Club”. Read/ watch it if you haven’t. Is Tyler real? I’ll leave that to your own conclusion.