Excerpt: None

When I was younger my parents though that I had an arsenal of imaginary friends. I often would visit my grandmother at her 100 and something year old house in the Carolinas only to play with little boys and girls who weren’t really there. Unlike other children with imaginary friends, my imaginary friends always had something a little awry about them. Tommy, the little boy who lived behind the tree outside, would sometimes have his tie on upside down. Clara, the seven year old girl who liked to ride her bike down the street, would talk without moving her mouth. These were small things, things I didn’t ever think much about. That is, until Tommy decided to play Dig Up Bones and I dug up his skeleton with a shovel in my grandparents backyard. Even at that age I knew that something wasn’t right about my friends, but I never connected their lack of existence with anything other than adults being too distracted to see them.
The police came and asked me how I knew those bones were there. I told them that Tommy told me they were there, he was my friend who lived in my grandparents backyard behind the tree. After years of therapy at the fireman’s suggestion, I finally stopped having imaginary friends. I would still see them, odd non-people that floated through life in a state of non-existence, but I would ignore them. As I grew older my desire to play with little boys and girls disappeared and was replaced by a desire for friends my parents could see. Content that whatever odd childhood insanity that conjured up eerie imaginary friends had passed, my parents stopped sending me to therapy and I returned to a state of relative normalcy.
I made my own conclusions about those specific events, and many others just like them. At first I was reluctant to believe they really existed, because no one else could see them. When I was 12 I was convinced I was insane, enough to the point where I suggested going to therapy to my parents again to “get rid of the half-people.” I realized therapy was a big joke when the therapist mocked my ideas about seeing things that weren’t there. Her questions were condescending, asking if the people I saw where white, or transparent, or liked to play tricks and yell “Boo!” while hiding. I quickly realized that no one would believe me and I wouldn’t be treated like a normal person until they went away. One day I just stopped talking about them. I told my therapist about school, about the play I wanted to try out for, the sports teams I wanted to join, the boys I thought were dreamy. When asked about the “half-people” of before, I would just shrug, as if I had no idea what she was talking about.
I can’t say that I’ve been plagued by them since then, because they’re really just so static. They were part of my life when I was younger because I would attract younger ones who just wanted friends they could see and talk to. As I grew older I became unappealing to the younger ones, who refused to age, and indifferent to the teenage ones, and nothing more than a child to the adults. Eventually, they passed into a state of blandness. I could see them, hear them, feel them walk by me, but we would pretend as if we’d never seen each other. I would have been content to go on this way, minus the occasional answer-seeking from a random ‘professional,’ had it not been for that one flyer.