Friends

Most people would call me an imaginary friend, but I don’t like that term. I’d like to just be called “friend.” When Jerry was four, his dad left him and his mom. A month later he created me --I guess to deal with it all. After a year of us playing together, his mom started to worry.  He was the only one who could see me. When he would talk to me, she thought he was talking to himself. She set him up with a therapist, but that didn’t last long. We moved a lot so I was his only friend. At the last house there was a stream in the backyard. We would build bridges and pretend we were trolls. Jerry’s mom worked a double shift at the grocery store so we would stay home and play card games with his grandma. She liked me and tried to convince Jerry’s mom that “I was good for him,” whatever that meant. Whenever his mom was around, he wouldn’t talk to me.

It started getting worse once school started. One day, he got invited to eat lunch with some boys and he left me alone at another table. He didn’t introduce me or ask if I could come, too. He just left. After awhile, he stopped playing with me. He would tell me he was too old to play. I would say, “I can be old, too.” But he didn’t listen. He stuffed me in a closet and as he forgot about me, I started to fade away. For a while, I thought he would come back, but as the years crawled by, I began to lose hope.

One day, someone opened the door. Light streamed in and as my eyes adjusted to the light I saw the silhouette of a boy. He looked just like Jerry but I knew he couldn't be that young after all of this time. “Are you my daddy’s friend? Are you the boy he the used to play with?” he said. I smiled. He hadn’t said imaginary friend, he had just said friend. Above him was a tall man with kind eyes just like the boy’s. Jerry and his wife bought our childhood home so they could raise their son. Now Jerry Jr. and I play in the stream out back and pretend to be trolls.