Foster's without Foster's
Chapter 1: Friend
I have an imaginary friend. This would be totally unremarkable, except for the fact that I'm seventeen years old.
It started so long ago, before any of my coherent memories. I must have been a baby or a toddler, because by the time I was six I already thought of him as a close friend. Sometimes I watch old videos of myself as a baby, crawling around the old house, babbling, drooling, smiling. I try to look for some sign of him, some tiny scrap of understanding as to how he came to be.
Where do I look? Did he stand atop the walls of my crib, the way he now does at the foot of my bed? Would he have followed close to me, or watched me from high up places? What exactly did he look like back then? Of course, I don't see him in the videos—he's imaginary, after all. Instead, I start by looking at my eyes—simple, carefree, empty. I follow my infant gaze to oddly far away corners, the tops of bookshelves, the chandelier, closed cupboards that I smile at but make no effort to open. Every time I see my eyes wander somewhere strange, I think: was that him? What was he doing? Could he talk to me? Was he somehow older and wiser than I was?
There is something off, something deeply uncanny in watching myself as a baby. The eyes aren't right; there is something wrong in my emotions, my identity. The person I'm seeing isn't really me, nor is it human yet. Is it odd to think that a baby cannot be fully human? That I had to work my way up to humanity? That would mean there is no soul, which I can accept, but if I wasn't human, what was I? Maybe "human" is just a meaningless concept. (I know I'm supposed to look at babies and just think "Oh, how cute", and usually I do, but it's very different when I'm looking at myself.)
Back to my imaginary friend—what do I remember? I can't trust the nebulous mists of my imperfect memory. I look at old crayon drawings of the same unmistakable blue shape, the nigh-illegible journals in which mangled attempts at English words dance haphazardly across timid, straight blue lines which have no choice but to sigh and acquiesce to the chaos. "Bloo play with me today. We playd tag." That's not what I'm interested in, I want to sigh in exasperation to my younger self. Tell me what he was. What was his personality like? Did he teach you about life, or did you teach him?
He must have come from my mind, which doesn't explain his decade-long disappearance. He must have left sometime around the time my parents died, though strangely enough, I have no specific memories of his leaving. One day he was there, the next he was gone.
I wish I could sort everything out, think through my life chronologically, but I can't be sure of what order things happened in, or whether some things happened at all. If I have an imaginary friend, why not imaginary memories? Why not an imaginary life? What is the mind but a repository for scattered, disconnected, meaningless bits of information which we then try to organize into a narrative we can live with, a world we can live in?
As I try to fall asleep, he stands there in the darkness, motionless, smiling.