I recently found out that I am someone else’s imaginary friend. As you can imagine, this was a bit of a shock to me.
For me, it all began one rainy afternoon, when Charles
wasn’t allowed to play outside. This should have been the first sign I suppose.
The only children who still want to play outside are the imagining types – the
ones prone to thinking up people like me. Any other kid wouldn’t have even
noticed it was raining unless it made the power go out. But Charles was a boy of
an older kind of cut. He didn’t need much to be entertained, because he brought
all the adventure with him wherever he went. Why, with him, I have seen an
ordinary doctor’s office become the crow’s nest of the largest and most
frightening pirate ship you have ever seen, only to transmogrify into the very
desert island our ship had struck, complete with thousands of miles of thick,
Caribbean jungle.
One of my fondest memories that we shared was digging
for dinosaur bones in the Sahara desert. Past bottle caps and pieces of Solo
cups, we dug and dug, bent on finding the bones of the mighty T-Rex. At one
point, we stopped and wiped the sweat from our foreheads, parched from the heat
and sand. It was just then that our assistant, Mom, came out to the dig site
with a glass of ice cold water. Charles was thrilled, but immediately asked why
she brought only one, when I had been working just as hard as he had, and was
certainly just as thirsty. Mom was usually a meticulously careful person, and
not prone to such oversights. But she made quick work, and soon enough, another
glass of water (though not as cold as the first, I noticed) was procured.
We sat there, drinking in the rewards of our labor,
when, with one last trowel turn, Charles uncovered the greatest find in our
professional careers. Our assistant was quickly called to verify the find,
which she classified as the bone of a “Stick-a-saurus.” Though neither of us
were familiar with this particular classification, she assured us that it was a
highly sought after artifact, and that she was sure there was a museum that
would be interested in purchasing such a rare bone. In fact, after splitting
the commission for the find, we each went home with a hefty twenty-five cents each
– a sum that any professional archaeologist would have been proud to have, we
were told.
But now, after all these years, it has become clear
that I am nothing more than his imaginary friend. And you might think that this
would disappoint or upset me. After all, I never existed. I am just the product
of the imagination of a child. Some people might be upset if they realized that
they don’t exist, but not for me at all.
You see, I was with him through every high seas
adventure, every leap over the tallest building, and every fight with every henchman.
I always had his back and came through when all hope seemed lost. I was thought
of in his moments of greatest joy and greatest pain. There was no grounding
severe enough to put us in separate rooms. When there were no other friends
around, I was still there.
I was the cohort, the adventurer, and the best friend
of someone in need, and this is something that is not true of many people,
despite all their “realness.” At the end of the day, I have the greatest honor
that can be bestowed on any creature – real or otherwise. I was seen as a hero
in the mind of a child. And I wouldn’t trade that for all the Stick-a-sauraus
bones in the world.
