The majority of Yu-Mi’s friends were online ones. That wasn’t as sad as it sounded, excuse you. Becauuuse, Cyber Reality was basically like, reality two at this point, so online friends were basically IRL friends with an extra coat of paint on them Sometimes you’ll look at an Ender Dragon gijinka and you’ll go, “Yeah that’s my buddy who I play Minecraft with.” (Love ya, EndedDragon!)
Also, it’s kind of hard for Yu-Mi to go outside and do crazy fun things all that often. That was fine, though! All the real crazy fun stuff was in Cyberspace.
Cyber Reality is also fun! It is basically another form of real life at this point, no matter what Appa says. (He’s so behind on the times.) Could she really be blamed for spending so much time in it? No, right? It’s what everyone does! Well, mostly everyone. There were some exceptions, mostly people knew from school. Yu-Mi usually didn’t talk to those people; they were all super judgy for some reason. Well, Sunny wasn’t, which was good considering she was her girlfriend WHO IS REAL, BY THE WAY.
(Yeah, MiMi, your girlfriend from Canada.)
SHE IS NOT FROM CANADA.
Anyways! Having a girlfriend is also also fun. Sunny was great. They weren’t the type of people you’d expect to go well together, but opposites attract and all that. Sunny was just…genuinely a really nice person. Yu-Mi felt like she wasn’t liked by most of her classmates. She was probably just being paranoid, and she did have classmates she knew for a fact liked her, mostly people she gamed with, but the vibe was there, y’know? Was there something on her face? Was it something she had said? …it was probably something she had said. Yu-Mi would be the first to admit she had a loose tongue. When she opened her mouth, things just fell out, and you either liked it or you didn’t. You either liked Yu-Mi or you didn’t, and she had to remind herself that it didn’t matter all that much. She’d never see the majority of these people ever again after graduation.
Holy shit, graduation. She was gonna graduate. Whenever the thought came to Yu-Mi, it hit her with the force of a ton of bricks. (Or what she assumed was comparable to a ton of bricks. She had never been hit in the face by a brick before, let alone a ton of them.) It wasn’t ever a thought she lingered very long on, though. Like, it was only a transition, right? She’d get into college, go into computer science, yadda yadda yadda…everything would be fine. There was no way she could waste her time worrying, even if she was kinda uncertain.
Online friends were fun until they were in your DMs dumping paragraphs and paragraphs of things you were not emotionally ready for. Yu-Mi tried, she really did–or, at least, she thinks she did. She stared at the dark screen of her computer, biting her lip, until her hands shot out and typed something at lightning speed, as if the keyboard would bite her if she lingered on it for too long.
They felt like platitudes, empty words, but they were the most she could give. Whenever Yu-Mi tried to reach into the part of her heart you’re supposed to derive poignant words and advice from, the well was always dry. Was she crazy? Disconnected? Did she really not care at all? She hoped people didn’t think that. It was hard for her to show it at times, but she really did care about the friends she had, whether they knew her as MiMi or Yu-Mi.EpicGamer__MiMi__69:
holy shit dude im so sorry
i dont know what else to say but none of that was your fault
people are just shit sometimes dont blame yourself
That’s exactly why she worried what would happen if Cyber Reality was ever shut down somehow, or more realistically, she lost access to it. So many friends and such a large part of her world–the entirety of her world, even–just…lost. Bam. Poof. Kablooey. No matter what anyone said, no matter how much anyone tried to criticize it, online was very real for Yu-Mi. (So get off her ass, Appa.)
But, still, even so. No matter how much Yu-Mi believed Cyber Reality was practically another reality at this point, there would always be this feeling of disconnect. There would always be people who claimed she was living in a falsehood, and as much as Yu-Mi refuted them, there was a pit in her stomach. Take the greenhouse in Sycamore, for example. What made them any different from the flowers in Meatspace? They bloomed, they were vivid–but they were just lines of code. Which really doesn’t matter! Yu-Mi was just letting the words of other people get into her head. It was stupid. Really, it was stupid.
Yu-Mi pushed her chair across the room, over to where a bonsai plant rested on the windowsill. “Hi hi, Buddy,” she murmured as she picked it up. With her other hand, she opened the blinds, and the warm orange light of the setting sun streamed into her room. She held the plant close to her chest, squinting in the new glare of the light. Even if she lost Cyber Reality, even if she lost most of her life, she’d have Buddy. She’d have Sunny, too. Those were the two things she’d never lose. Whenever she went to help Sunny with her connection issues, or when Sunny tried to teach her kickboxing despite Yu-Mi’s persistent suckage at it (Sunny insisted that Yu-Mi would get better as long as she kept practicing; that girl never gave up. It was nice to have someone believe in her so strongly), or when Yu-Mi pruned Buddy, everything felt more vivid, more real. More alive. It was a feeling she would never allow herself to give up.
A “ping” noise came from her phone, which was lying on her desk next to her computer. Holding Buddy in place with her thighs, Yu-Mi scooted herself back to her desk. She opened up one of her drawers and took out a pill bottle and a bottle of water, then went about her daily struggle of opening the bottle. (Come on, child-proof cap, you know it’s your Yu-Mi.)
Yu-Mi Lee lived, just like everyone else. That’s all she wanted, really.