Don't Forget Me.

I’ve had an imaginary friend since I was six years-old (which was around the time my mom left on her lifelong vacation to Spain).  His name is Lethe; he told me so himself.  

On the night he appeared at my bedside, his image was spectral and danced in the moonlight from my window like dust particles.  Smiling a silvery smile, he slid over to my bed and, once out of the moonshine, seemed to solidify before my eyes.  His hair was spun from water, and his eyes were the sterling scales of a fish, his skin the downy snow that falls from the sky in winter.  He wasn’t clothed in anything more than blue silk, which fell from his body like the cascade of a waterfall.  His fingers were cool against my cheek when he reached out to touch the yellowish cobweb collected beneath my eye.  The bruise throbbed a little under his fingertips, which caused me to wince, and he asked me if I wanted a lullaby to help me fall asleep.

He was there every day from then on, and I found myself looking forward to coming home from school.  He’d play marbles with me on my bedroom floor.  He’d tell me stories about the place he came from and make promises to take me there someday.  He had a better ear than me, and would warn me when he heard the front door close with my father’s stumbling entrance, or when he heard ogreish footsteps on the stairs.  There wasn’t anything he could do to help once my father found me, but the fact that he cared enough to be my lookout was enough.

He was always there when I returned to my room in tears with the latest bruise or a brand new pattern of blood somewhere on my person.  He was always there to hold me until my crying abated, and to tell me stories of his homeland, and to sing me lullabies until the pain went away.  He was always there to tuck me into bed and kiss me goodnight.  I never knew where he went while I slept, but he was always there until I fell asleep, to my knowledge.  I never saw him in the morning when I awoke, but he was always there when I got home from school.  

Most people say that imaginary friends fade as you get older, that they eventually disappear, because imaginary friends are just that: imaginary.

But he never went away.

By the time I was fourteen, he was still there, every afternoon and every night.  And we still played marbles, and he still told me stories, and he still acted as my lookout, and he was still the one who kissed my hurt away.  Only, now he kissed me kissed me.  And at fourteen, I was old enough to discern between the sort of kiss that a mother and son would share, and the sort of kiss that lovers would share.  His kisses were definitely of the second sort.  And I didn’t mind; on the contrary, I luxuriated in those kisses, and I happily returned them whenever they were given.

I often tried to imagine what it would be like to kiss the cute brunet who sat beside me in Art class, and I decided that I would almost assuredly prefer his kisses to hers or to those of the blonde girl next to her.  

I drew pictures of him in that class, as I sat next to the cute brunet and two seats away from the blonde girl.  Someone told me once that I had a lot of artistic talent, or something.  On a nondescript Wednesday afternoon, my teacher asked me who the girl in my picture was as I sat there and darkened the smooth curve of his face with a charcoal pencil.  I explained that he wasn’t a girl, and that he was my best friend.  I’d never thought that my relationship with him might be considered peculiar to other people.  After seeing my pictures of his, I guess you could say,  otherworldly form, no one believed that he was real.  My friends talked behind their hands about my pictures and their subject, “Who is that?” “I don’t know, I’ve never seen him,” “Maybe he goes to a different school…?” “Pft, Garrett’s crazy… A guy that looks like that can’t exist.”

When teachers started asking questions, I answered without inhibition.  I didn’t see what I had to gain from lying… I’ve known him since I was six; I only see him in the evening; no, he doesn’t live in this world, he comes from another one; he’s never been with me outside of my room; he’s my best friend, he takes care of me and protects me and makes me forget—

Forget what?  Protects you from who?  Doesn’t your father take care of you?

And so my hideous personal life was unraveled.  Each thread was brought to light and examined by doctors and lawyers and police officers.  My father was sent away.  They scoured the world, it seemed, but my mother couldn’t be found.  So I was sent to a foster home, and above all, I was terrified that he wouldn’t find me at my new location.

But my fear was unnecessary.

He appeared at my alien bedside that night, and out of relief I started crying.  He held me and cooed encouraging things in my ear and sung to me, and then once I’d calmed down, he kissed me.  One of those ideal, incredible, intimate kisses.  And he stayed with me until I fell asleep.

Almost immediately after settling into my new home, I started to see a psychiatrist.  

“They tell me you’re not real,” I said to him one night.

He blinked his timeless silver eyes at me and replied, “I’m insulted.”

“What?”

“Well, if someone told you that you weren’t real, wouldn’t you be insulted?”

“I…”  I looked down at my bedroom floor, where my Math homework was spread out.  So many numbers…formulas and theorems and rules and steps…a moment ago, I’d been breezing through the problems.  Now, I didn’t see the point.

He sighed and reached for my hand.  I felt his long, nimble fingers lace with mine as he said, “Can you see me?”

I looked at him, stared him right in the eye, and nodded.

He smiled that serene smile of his, which always managed to pull a curtain string in my heart, a string that released a, a floodgate of sorts and sent warmth seeping in tendrils through my body.  Squeezing my hand and leaning closer, so that a scant inch spanned the space between our faces, he asked, “Can you feel me?”

My breath shuddered over my lips as I nodded again.  He smiled more and leaned in closer and then we were touching, his mouth, his tongue, his fingers on the sides of my face, sliding around to the back of my head—they were all there.  It was a fact, a truth, it was two plus two equals four, the most elementary of math equations.

He drew away slowly, so slowly and so little that I barely realized that the kiss had ended.  I could still feel the warmth of it, the lazy liquid scorch of it in my veins.

“Then who’s to say I’m not real?”

“They…” I panted, catching the breath he’d pilfered from me.  “They say…my foster mother, she, she says that she passes by my room and hears me having…having one-sided conversations,” I rambled, unable to curb my tongue, “and that when she comes to, to bring me cookies she finds me playing marbles by myself on my bedroom floor…they say that…trauma, emotional scarring, it’s not real, it’s all in my head…it’s…”

“Shhh…” he whispered as he petted the sides of my face.  “Of course it’s all in your head.”

My eyes widened, and in that moment I was deathly afraid that he’d confirm everything everybody had been saying, that he wasn’t real, that I was mentally ill, that…

“Where else does reality exist?” he asked quietly.

I blinked, my fear put on hold by the stern hand of bemusement.  “What?”

“Where else does reality exist?” he repeated.  “Where else, but in the head?  I’m in your head, just as this room is in your head, and this paper…”  One of his hands dropped to my Math homework.  “Just as you are in your foster mother’s head, in your friends’ heads… If your foster mother didn’t know you, to her, you wouldn’t exist.  Before you met your foster mother, did she exist?”  

“…Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because…she…had to have existed…”

“But, how do you know for sure?”

“I…don’t…”

He smiled that smile again and kissed the end of my nose.  “If I’m in your head, then I’m real.  I’m a part of your reality.”

The doctors continued to tell me otherwise.

But he never went away.

A few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I went to my room in tears, having just returned from another therapy session.  He was startled; I hadn’t cried since that night two years ago.  And then I did something that I’d never done, period: I yelled at him.  I yelled at him and told him to leave me alone; I told him that I didn’t want to see him anymore, that I hated him, that he was the bane of my existence.  I threw my notebook at him, and I hurt him.  He bled; there’s a stain on my carpet to prove it.  

Then he did something that he’d never done before, either: he started crying.  He shrank back on the floor against my bed, and he looked like he wanted to disappear.  The pink in his eyes, and the red scratches on his cheek, and the claret droplets beading along a particularly deep cut from my notebook, were all things I’d never seen decorating him before.  I could do nothing but stare for a long moment, because even his pain was beautiful.  His mellifluous voice warbled like that of a songbird and his tears fell like shards of crystal from his eyes, his white skin flushed with the faintest of color.

I found myself kneeling beside him, holding him, comforting him, like he had always done for me.  Only, it was different from what he had always done for me in that I was the cause of his tears, and he’d never been the cause of mine (up until now, it could be argued, but in the end I really didn’t blame him for anything, no matter what I’d told him).  I apologized, over and over and over again, and I told him that I loved him, and then I apologized more.  “I’m sorry” became a mantra, whispered against his cheek and forehead and temple and lips.  After a little while, he stopped crying, and I could breathe easy again.

I told him again that I was sorry.  He forgave me.  I told him that I couldn’t take this anymore.  He understood me.  He rose to his feet, took my hand, and drew me into the moonlight that was draped from my windowpane, the only light in the room.  He loved the moon.  As he stepped into its mellow lambency, he looked again as he had that first night he came to me, his shape like dancing dust particles, evanescent and ephemeral and ethereal.  

Then Lethe leaned in and kissed me, and my eyes automatically closed.  That was the last time I saw my room, and the world in which it existed.  
 
end.