when i was a kid i had an imaginary friend.
well, not a friend inasmuch as someone to talk to. not a friend inasmuch a conduit for the stories i told to entertain myself, not quite a person or an animal or a character but rather a courtyard in the clouds, a place where someone would listen to me. i felt so misunderstood as a child. i would whisper, in the dark, about how i wanted the gap between my front teeth to be wider, and what i thought was going to happen next in my favourite novels, and the fantasies i had about the expanse of experiences that i could one day call my life. i named that friend ‘you’, nothing more, nothing less.
roughly ten years later i finally see the irony: i write to you, but you don’t exist. you don’t love me. you don’t talk back. i’m still talking to you but it’s the same ‘you’ my childhood self used to chat with—someone who doesn’t exist. i started with an imaginary friend, now i imagine that you’re my friend, that you’ll read this, that there might come a day when you see fit to talk to me again. i kind of wish i had the self-respect that all the disaffected literary icons i love seem to possess. i wish i could write that i don’t need closure from you, i wish i could demonstrate that i know how to live a life that is full and juicy like a summer plum and not just a litany of losing you and living with it. i’ve always loved the word litany. i’ve always loved a you that doesn’t make any demands of me.
which is the crux of why we keep imaginary friends, isn’t? real people are harrowing and messy and complicated and they want things from us, like open and honest communication and for us to reply to their texts and apologies that come in on time. i could call you a hundred names here, you’d still show up in my head, this is easier, in a sense. but this isn’t real, either, and that’s what bothers me about it.
recently it started to bother me when things aren’t real. for example last week or so i was supposed to go to montreal to be with a boy. i was supposed to go on a sunset hike and check out a bar and maybe sleep in his bed, and i cancelled at the last minute because i knew none of it would be real. because i knew, even if i went through the motions of falling in love with him, even if i said all the right words, that it would be a simulacrum of what i really want and a betrayal of how i really feel. towards him, i am indifferent. our initial conversations reminded me of you so i tried to push him into being you, and of course he failed. he failed at being you now, because you are an imaginary friend and thus you cannot disappoint me, and he failed at being you then, because unlike him i always found you interesting.
occasionally i start to suspect there’s a cap on serious relationships i can be in. statistics say i’ll meet eighty thousand people in a lifetime, real people, and surely the cardinality of the subset i’ll have life-changing relationships with must exceed the number of people i’ve had my heart broken by already. surely there must be someone who i can have something real with, surely lightning can strike again. before i was a mathematician, though, i was a poet, and the poet says: second best.
the poet says: consign yourself to imaginary friendships. it will make better material.
i don’t know about you, but i’m really sick of having good material.