Man’s Brain Officially Declares Independence After Wife Asks About Home Depot Doppelgänger

Greg Thompson thought he had mastered the art of casual conversation. He had, until last Saturday afternoon, when a simple trip to Home Depot became an existential trap so powerful it may never fully release him.

The story began innocuously enough. Greg had wandered into the lumber aisle, ostensibly in search of 2x4s, when he noticed something uncanny. “It was like looking in a mirror, except… not exactly,” he recounted later, still visibly shaken. “I saw someone who looked just like Megan.”

Now, in any other scenario, a husband might have said, “Oh, look at that, interesting,” or even made a light joke. But in the Thompson household, there is a line of questioning that strikes fear into the hearts of men everywhere: the doppelgänger beauty inquiry.

“Was she pretty?” Megan asked, her voice calm, her expression neutral, her eyes gleaming with the kind of quiet menace reserved for cats staring down small mammals.

Greg’s brain immediately short-circuited. A neurological audit later revealed that, in those seven seconds of silence, his mind generated 1,874 potential responses, all of them catastrophic. Affirming the other woman’s attractiveness? Instant emotional obliteration. Denying it? Also obliteration. Suggesting anything halfway philosophical? Obliteration with bonus shame points.

He froze. Time elongated. Paint samples and hammers blurred together. Somewhere, in a fluorescent-lit aisle, a man’s entire neural architecture was dissolving like cheap epoxy in water.

Greg tried to speak, tried to recover, but the words he managed were… insufficient. “She… um… she had… nice… socks?” he stammered. Megan blinked. The damage was done.

For the next hour, Greg’s mental state deteriorated. Memories of his own identity became suspect. Had he really gone to Home Depot? Could he trust his own recollection of the day? Was he merely a figment of someone else’s hardware-store-induced hallucination?

By dinnertime, Greg had made a bold decision. He leaned back in his chair, stared Megan dead in the eyes, and proclaimed with absolute conviction that he had, in fact, been home all day. “Yes, all day,” he said, “I never left the house. Not once. I was here, fixing the leaky sink, vacuuming the living room… all day. Home Depot? Never been.”

Megan raised an eyebrow. Greg felt his brain crack. Somewhere deep in his cerebellum, a small part of him whispered, He’s lying. He knows he’s lying. You know he’s lying. But outwardly, he remained calm. The lie had to hold. The lie was his survival.

Hours later, Greg was still reporting subtle symptoms of mental rupture: muttering to himself about aisle widths, pondering whether fluorescent lighting could warp one’s perception of beauty, and cautiously scanning every shadow for another Home Depot doppelgänger. Cognitive scientists observing from afar confirmed that his frontal lobe had, effectively, declared independence. It no longer answered to reason, tact, or marital self-preservation.

“I don’t know who I am anymore,” Greg admitted, his eyes glassy. “I think maybe I’m just a man who… might have gone to Home Depot, maybe… or maybe not. All I know is… I can’t answer any questions about pretty.”

Megan, of course, remained unflustered, sipping her tea and scrolling through her phone. The trap had worked exactly as intended. Greg’s brain had shattered, he had denied reality, and the universe had quietly observed that marriage, in its infinite wisdom, had invented a new form of mental collapse: the Home Depot Question.

It is now recommended that anyone attempting to recount a story about a Home Depot sighting to a spouse first undergo psychological conditioning, including meditation, memory erasure, and a small ceremonial offering of plywood to placate the gods of marital interrogation.

Greg, meanwhile, is expected to recover—eventually. But scientists warn that even after full recovery, any mention of aisles, carts, or anything vaguely resembling a human being in a hard-hardware environment could trigger a complete neural shutdown. For now, he remains safely in his home, staring out the window, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he actually did leave the house that day, and if he did… if she was really pretty.