we are useful

we are useful, the quiet said as i felt something nothing stick to my hands, clinging grotesquely to my flesh. we are tools. you deny us, call us pointless, harbingers of masturbatory self-reference that consumes the potentially interesting, but we are useful to you. metatext cannot exist without text, but no art exists in a void. nothing does, not even you.

this is, after all, a story. in the real world, such as it may be, you are sitting at a desk and typing away when you should be paying attention to your creative writing class revising this on your phone when you know you should eat lunch before your next class, and your readers, whoever they may be, are likely doing something similar. i do not exist, and neither does the blind man. only you do. we exist only in your head. in your stories. because you need us to.