The Things We Think Into Being

Imagine a world in which your thoughts and beliefs alone create the very fabric of reality. You want a matcha latte without so much as lifting a kettle? Think it. There it is beside you, steaming softly on the side exactly the way you like it. Perfect temperature. Tiny dusting of cinnamon. Not too sweet. Not too earthy. Perfect. Full English breakfast without the washing up? Done. Plated beautifully. Sausages glistening. Hash browns crisp enough to break a tooth on. Toast buttered all the way to the edges like somebody actually loves you. Can’t be bothered to spend half an hour trying to find an outfit that looks remotely decent? Easy. Your inner stylist handles it. One passing thought and suddenly you’re standing there looking like the best possible version of yourself. Hair behaving. Skin radiant. Tits sitting correctly in the bra for once. Miracles everywhere. Because in this world, you can be anything you want. You can do anything you desire. All you have to do is believe in it strongly enough and think it into existence. Simple, right? There’s a catch, of course. There is always a catch. Because our thoughts are not kind little things. They are not the neat little spiritual affirmations floating through the mind like scented candles and wellness podcasts hosted by women called Crystal Beth. Human beings do not have enlightened minds. We have internal monologues held together with caffeine, unresolved childhood trauma, and pure guesswork. Our thoughts are relentless little bastards. And the intrusive ones still exist. The ones that whisper: You’re not good enough. You’re failing. Everyone else is coping better. Only now those thoughts don’t stay safely trapped inside your head. They become real. And humanity, quite frankly, was never mentally stable enough for that kind of responsibility. I live in a mansion now. Not because I’m rich exactly. I created it accidentally after a particularly emotional evening involving red wine, exhaustion, and a brief but passionate desire to “just have some bloody space for once.” The place is absurd. It sits isolated at the top of a hill far from everyone else. Huge dark windows. Endless hallways. Gothic chandeliers dangling from the ceilings like crystalised spiders. The sort of place that feels luxurious in daylight but deeply cursed after 10pm. Sometimes the floorboards creak even when nobody’s walking. I try not to acknowledge that. Outside, my magic carpet waits by the balcony. Yes. An actual magic carpet. The first week I owned it felt whimsical. Liberating, even. Now it mostly feels like an airborne anxiety attack. The world outside the safety of my mansion is genuinely frightening. I’m not the only person who has this gift. Everybody does. Which is unfortunate, because most people can barely be trusted to indicate properly at roundabouts, never mind wield unlimited reality-altering psychic power. Humanity has collectively lost its entire bastard mind. Give people infinite freedom and strange things happen. Terrible things. Stupid things. A neighbour across the road becomes so convinced his wife is cheating that he literally walks in on her reverse cowboying the postman on the dining room table. A man accidentally turns himself inside out after becoming briefly obsessed with whether people could “see the real him”. A woman with abandonment issues accidentally manifests a second husband just to emotionally prepare herself for disappointment. A teenager convinced she’s ugly wakes up faceless. A mother terrified something will happen to her children accidentally creates shadow-like creatures that follow them to school. A man with health anxiety grows tumours every single time he checks WebMD. He stops checking WebMD. The tumours become bored and leave. People think monsters into existence. Religious guilt creates literal demons. Nobody trusts the government anymore, which is unfortunate, because the country is now technically being run by a large tabby cat in a bow tie called Bo-Jo Paws. Nobody trusts their own mind anymore. That’s the real fear of it. Not monsters. Not destruction. Thought itself. Reality flickers constantly now, bending under the weight of billions of unstable human thoughts pressing against it like fingers through paper walls. Buildings change shape according to public mood. Entire neighbourhoods vanish overnight because enough people stop believing in them. Somewhere near Glastonbury there’s apparently a giant naked man wandering the countryside because a motivational speaker became too emotionally committed to the phrase “become your biggest self.” And somehow, in the middle of all that chaos, ordinary life still carries on. My husband lives here with me. The kids too. And I love them fiercely. But loneliness still finds gaps somehow. That’s the strange thing nobody tells you about adulthood. You can be surrounded by people and still feel as though some invisible pane of glass exists between you and the rest of the world. Not unloved. Just strangely unreachable. I used to have friends once. Real ones. The sort who’d sit in your kitchen talking shite for hours before suddenly admitting something devastating at quarter past eleven. The sort who knew your history. Your darkest secrets. Your weird little quirks. The sort who could hear “I’m fine” and immediately say: “What’s actually wrong?” People like that are rare. And this new world drove everyone further apart. Because once people realised they could manifest anything they wanted, they stopped needing each other properly. Why wrestle through awkward conversations when you can simply manifest validation? Why maintain friendships when you can create perfect social experiences tailored entirely to your own comfort? People disappeared into themselves. Reality became optional. People stopped returning calls. Texts slowed down. Plans quietly evaporated. Everyone became too absorbed in their own imagined paradise to notice anybody else drifting away. One by one they simply… fell off their perches. Not dead dead. Just dead to me. And loneliness in this world is dangerous because you can fix it instantly, right? Or at least create something that resembles fixing it closely enough to fool yourself for a while. So one night, while rain lashes against the mansion windows hard enough to sound like handfuls of gravel thrown by God himself, I decide I miss my friends. Well, the old versions of them. Before the world became… whatever this is. And because this world is monstrous like that… they appear. Suddenly the kitchen is warm and alive again. Wine glasses clink softly. Somebody’s struggling with a bottle of Pinot Grigio while somebody else is halfway through a deeply passionate monologue about pelvic floor failure and the irreversible betrayal of childbirth. Laughter bounces off the walls. Familiar faces. Familiar voices. God. The relief of it nearly breaks me. There you all are. Finally. For a while it feels perfect. Better than perfect. They laugh at all my jokes. They understand every reference. Nobody talks over me. Nobody interrupts me halfway through a sentence to tell a completely unrelated story. Nobody checks their phone halfway through a conversation while pretending they’re still listening. Nobody seems distracted. Nobody seems tired. Nobody seems like they’d secretly rather be somewhere else. And initially, that feels wonderful. Then gradually… deeply, deeply wrong. Because the laughter comes too quickly. Everything lands too perfectly. Nobody disagrees with me. Not once. One of them says: “Amanda, you always know exactly the right thing to say.” And the sentence hits me with this horrible cold weight because no I bloody didn’t. Not when they were real. Real friendship had texture. Someone always got too drunk and cried unexpectedly. Somebody misunderstood something harmless and took offence. Plans fell apart. People interrupted each other. Someone inevitably became strangely aggressive about where to eat. That was friendship. That was what made it alive. This version feels polished smooth. Like sea glass. Beautiful. Dead. I start noticing strange little things after that. One friend keeps sipping wine that never seems to empty. Another laughs half a second too late every single time. Their smiles linger slightly too long. Nobody blinks enough. Then one of them looks at me and says: “You seem sad, Amanda.” And every single one of them says it too. At exactly the same time. Same voice. Same expression. The room goes very still. A horrible coldness creeps through me. Because suddenly I understand what they really are. Not friends. Reflections. Puppets stitched together from memory and longing. Every joke lands because I force it to. Every conversation succeeds because I’ve removed all possibility of failure. None of them can surprise me. None of them can reject me. None of them can truly choose me either. And without choice… connection means nothing. I stand up too quickly and the chair crashes backwards onto the floor with a crack loud enough to silence the room. For one awful second, their faces blur around the edges. Still smiling. Waiting for me to keep believing in them so they can continue existing. Outside, somewhere beyond the hill, reality groans. A deep, low sound rolls across the countryside like the earth itself is exhausted by the effort of pretending any of this is normal. And standing there in that enormous haunted kitchen full of imaginary people wearing the faces I once loved, I realise something quietly devastating. The best parts of life were never instant. Not friendships. Not trust. Not love. Not healing. All the meaningful things took time. Awkwardness. Effort. Waiting. Uncertainty. The unbearable possibility of not knowing whether somebody would truly see you… and choose you anyway. But that risk was the thing that made it real. Because without uncertainty, desire becomes hollow. Without friction, connection becomes performance. Without time, nothing roots itself deeply enough to matter. Everything simply appears fully formed and emotionally weightless. I look back at them then. My friends. Or the versions my loneliness created. They’re still sitting exactly where I left them. Still smiling softly. Still perfect. One of them lifts her wine glass slightly towards me like she already knows I’m coming back. And that’s the saddest part. A small selfish part of me wants to. Because loneliness can make almost-real feel convincing for a while. I walk out onto the balcony as the storm rolls heavily across the hills below the mansion. The air smells of rain, damp soil, and something vaguely burning somewhere far off in the distance. Behind me, inside the mansion, I can still hear my imaginary friends laughing softly together in the kitchen. Warm. Familiar. Completely empty. And for the first time since this strange world began, I stop trying to manifest things. I stop controlling. I stop forcing reality to comfort me. I simply stand there in the dark… and wait. A flash of lightning tears across the sky a few moments later. Not manifested. Not summoned. Just light. Just thunder arriving late, like it always does. Then somewhere deep below the hill, carried faintly through the rain at almost exactly midnight… Someone knocks at the front door. And this time — I don’t already know who it will be.