More Conversations
I dumped my imaginary boyfriend when I turned sixteen so I might try some real ones. They've all been spent now, and find myself regretting him more than any of them.
I stopped writing to my imaginary penpal when I began to feel that God might be saddened that I would choose to make someone up rather than speak my worries to Him.
I sit at this laptop in an old roommate's scrubs, watching a BBC Victorian Drama. I don't want to be the clever heroine. I don't want to be loved by the brooding, but handsome hero. I don't want to jump into the roiling fantasy adventure I returned to the library this morning at sunrise. I never want to meet anyone who smells that bad. I have inevitably found my reality preferable to the cynical realism my imagination imbues other people's fantasies.
I had a third imaginary friend, and we used to speak. He was something, and sometime, between boyfriend and penpal. We would hold long conversations. I would supply his lines, speaking as if to this character I'd planted in my imagination but knowing it was just me; my words, my replies, my questions, me trying to give myself the acceptance and affection for which I have always hungered.
This dream, though, speaking to spirit of a woman, making such an odd promise, it tasted different than imaginary. It tasted like prayer.
But typing it now in this diary gives me the aftertaste of schizophrenia. I have many voices, and they're all silent now, perhaps poisoned by remorse, even when I reach out from my pillow in the moments after midnight and cobble together tales from the dozens of literary images which have collected inside me through the years. When examined microscopically, my ephemeral worlds are created from one material - the carbon of my soul.
I do hate using the world soul. It's always a little too melodramatic, but what else does one call that part of oneself which is not body, not spirit, not intellect, but something between and underneath?
I stopped writing to my imaginary penpal when I began to feel that God might be saddened that I would choose to make someone up rather than speak my worries to Him.
I sit at this laptop in an old roommate's scrubs, watching a BBC Victorian Drama. I don't want to be the clever heroine. I don't want to be loved by the brooding, but handsome hero. I don't want to jump into the roiling fantasy adventure I returned to the library this morning at sunrise. I never want to meet anyone who smells that bad. I have inevitably found my reality preferable to the cynical realism my imagination imbues other people's fantasies.
I had a third imaginary friend, and we used to speak. He was something, and sometime, between boyfriend and penpal. We would hold long conversations. I would supply his lines, speaking as if to this character I'd planted in my imagination but knowing it was just me; my words, my replies, my questions, me trying to give myself the acceptance and affection for which I have always hungered.
This dream, though, speaking to spirit of a woman, making such an odd promise, it tasted different than imaginary. It tasted like prayer.
But typing it now in this diary gives me the aftertaste of schizophrenia. I have many voices, and they're all silent now, perhaps poisoned by remorse, even when I reach out from my pillow in the moments after midnight and cobble together tales from the dozens of literary images which have collected inside me through the years. When examined microscopically, my ephemeral worlds are created from one material - the carbon of my soul.
I do hate using the world soul. It's always a little too melodramatic, but what else does one call that part of oneself which is not body, not spirit, not intellect, but something between and underneath?
Comments
Post a Comment