“I had an imaginary friend.”
I had an imaginary friend. Simply put, they are missed. My friend once told me, “relax and think good things.” I would like my “friend” to know that I am trying.
I WISH THAT I COULD DEAL WITH HERE WHEN I WANT TO BE THERE.
I’m listening to Angel Olsen’s Windows as I write this post.
Won’t you open a window sometime?
Won’t you open a window sometime?
What’s so wrong with the light?
What’s so wrong with the light?
This song breaks me every time. The longing in her voice as it whisper-cracks: Why can’t you see? is almost too much. It hits me in the same place my own imaginary friend experience hits me, which I wrote about in my book, The Leaving Season. The essay “Imaginary Friend” was excerpted by Oprah Daily (though they ran it with the very misleading, imho, title of “The Case for An Emotional Affair”—misleading not because I don’t think it was an emotional affair, but because I was not trying to make a case for what remains one of the most painful experiences of my life). An early reader warned that I should cut the “Imaginary Friend” essay from the book. You sound so…desperate, she’d said. But that was the point. The space your body inhabits when it is trying to leave is incredibly desperate—everything is on the line. I couldn’t pretend differently just because it made me, or others, uncomfortable.
This, I think, is why the postcard writer puts the word friend in quotations. We know what we are talking about, even if we can’t say it. Everything about this postcard pulses with this ripped open feeling. The front, with its blackout message—Your Fake world, is fleeting—feels cruel. Accusatory. Yet also fair. So much of desire is false, ephemeral, a bone disintegrating in your hand. The longing for a person who does not want you, a person you cannot have, is a space that is both as uncrossable as an ocean and as intimate as a grain of sand between one’s teeth.
I spent quite a while staring at this handwriting. Do I know the loops and curves of that W? That H? Do you?
This sender wants their “friend” to know are trying, they say. It is unclear to me if that means trying to leave or trying to stay. The all caps note across the bottom is almost hidden behind the cancellation waves, sinking like a ship. In the meantime, their “friend” is on the other side of the ocean, staring at the shapes in the sea, rolling a grain of sand around on their tongue.
The Leaving Season Postcard Project was born out of my love for postcards and a suspicion that we are all leaving things, all the time. If you’d like to send me a postcard, please check out this link for instructions.
Want to be part of The Leaving Season Postcard Project? Or use the postcards in your classroom or bookclub? Send me a note!
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Buy The Leaving Season here, Welcome to Shirley here, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire here, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home here.