the imaginary friend

These days, Charlie and I speak about places we’ve been and places we’ll go. In that way, we haven’t changed. He has his own apartment now and he thought it best we make room for each other as individuals; like an old married couple sleeping in separate bedrooms. It’s emptier without him. The floors don’t creak and the walls don’t whistle like they did when he was here, imaginary and invisible, but always there nevertheless. But now, when he comes over and we sit on the loveseat by the window, sharing a kettle of tea and words about dreams we’ve had and people we’ve met and all the places we’ve been and all the places we’ll go, I look at him with a tender fondness.
Charlie is tall, he has always been the tallest and my most favored of all of our fantastical friends whose heights dwindle from person to person on a perfect incline downward. He is thin but not gaunt, tall but not harrowingly so. Grey eyes, a neutral stare today, but that hasn’t always been; over time his smile has dimmed as he’s faced the realities of time ticking on and on right by my side. Every second of every day for so many years, Charlie was with me. For a long time though, I was not with him. And he would watch as I would gather myself each day as hastily as one might impatiently gather dry laundry from clothespins off the wire outside and I would lay myself to sleep thinking I was alone. Through all of my perils, my most gut-wrenching moments of self-loathing, my downward slope into adulthood, Charlie was there, watching.
I don’t know when I forgot about Charlie, or if there was ever a conscious decision to stop being with him, but as a product of my own mind, he could not have left me then. He was tied to me like a child to their mother or a dog to their owner. And I could pay him no mind, and he could pay me all of his in return. And I’m sad in our visits now, and he knows it. He shows me sensitivity and I give him the least amount of vulnerability I can muster in return – so that he may sleep at night, free of the burden of watching me go to my grave in dejected solitude without ever acknowledging his existence. He deserves the side of me I created him with, the side that is almost dangerously care-free, vivid in color, and happy. I owe him that much.