(one) THE IMAGINARY FRIEND
Saw a headline the other day: Sad news, the imaginary friend is becoming extinct. I didn’t need to open the article to know it had something to do with the effect of screen time on the imagination. I had an imaginary friend once—I named her Ruby after my dead cat and gave her red hair, like my mother’s. I always thought I should’ve inherited Mom’s red instead of my dishwater blond, so I gave it to Ruby, who wore it well. For the most part, she wanted to do the things I wanted to do, which made me happy, as I was a tyrannical little girl. Sometimes she grew cross with me and I would vanish her from my mind like dreams after a morning shower. She was prettier than me, but I didn’t hold it against her or worry about being outshone. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew no one could see her but me.
The headline got me thinking: where do all of these phantom siblings go? Do they really go extinct, or do they simply change forms? A study from 1933[1] found that 79 percent of 143 children’s imaginary friends were human beings, characters or, in five cases, elves and fairies. The other 21 percent were anthropomorphized animals, dolls, or sentimental objects. Some of the children described their make-believe friends in vivid, consistent detail, but most reported beings with ambiguous appearances and qualities that could change according to the whims of the child. Hypothetically, these imaginary friends could shift, leak, and blur. They could lose their outlines and become smoke.
A later study[2] found that 55 percent of those with imaginary companions had no siblings, just like me. I introduced Ruby as my sister—sometimes younger, sometimes older. Her hair color was the one thing that never changed. I told my friends she’d gotten the color that was meant to be passed down to me. Together, Ruby and I were the perfect composite of my parents. She had my mother’s sharp ankles, and I had my father’s dark eyes. By myself, I added up to nothing. Being an only child is a sort of extinction. You are the last of your kind, the only existing combination of many possibilities.
(two) THE YEAR 2018
There are 12,045 photos in my phone’s camera roll, 3,670 of which are screenshots. Most of the screenshots are of text messages I don’t want to forget or just things that made me laugh. For example: i made u a set of keys with a red lanyard :) and i’m making pasta u want some? also i have weed and lotion for u and I wanna have died already after living a full and fulfilling life.
I don’t know where all these images came from. When I scroll to the top of my camera roll, the first one is from September 30, 2018 at 1:18 a.m. What I was doing on that date at that time is, judging by my smudged eyeliner, crying. I was 22, had box-dyed black hair, and worked at a cafe where my coworkers were all alcoholics or drug addicts or both. I thought I would probably end up becoming one, too. This was back when I used to tape random words to my bedroom wall, little reminders like STAMINA and CRUMBLY and MALICIOUS. I did this to motivate myself through the door and out into the crumbly, malicious world.
I behaved differently then, mostly because I was younger. It’s easy to explain big changes in this way: I was younger then, I’m older now, and so on. By that point, my parents had both developed chronic illnesses that put them out of work and out of balance. Their pain instilled in me a frantic fear of aging; at every turn, I thought the floor might cave beneath me. I’d stumbled upon a question I couldn’t find an answer to, which also accounted in part for my impulsive behavior.[3] Why is there something instead of nothing? I either read it in a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet or on a subway station ad, or maybe I heard it in that Silver Jews song. Regardless of its origin, the question didn’t impress me at first, mostly because I didn’t care to consider its implications. All the same, there was something troubling about it.
My stomach folds into itself at the idea of losing those 12,045 photos. I think of them as self-curated history. I’m not always great about backing things up, but I’m wary of the Cloud and don’t like how searchable images are these days. You can look up “dog” in your photo stream and find every single picture of every single dog you’ve ever photographed. It used to be that you could look up “brassiere” to locate all your nudes and bikini pics, but Apple seems to have removed that feature. I guess it creeped people out too much knowing their phones could do that. In a recent interview,[4] Elon Musk announced that, in the future, we will be able to save and replay our memories, that everything encoded in memory will be uploadable and restorable with something called Neuralink, a chip implanted in the brain. It exhausts me to even think about it, but I understand the motivation behind the technology. Losing a year’s worth of files would feel like losing the year itself. I can’t count on my memory—if not for these images I might never have had black hair, never have messaged my friends, never have laughed at the things they said. But maybe we are allowed to, or even supposed to, forget these things to make room for something new.
(three) DINO-SHAPED NUGGETS
Anyone know what happened to those guys? I haven’t seen one in what feels like a decade. Nor, for that matter, have I seen Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks Breath Strips, Shrek-themed Cheez-Its, Altoids Sours, Hubba Bubba Squeeze Pops, or Fun Dip anywhere. If these treats have become obsolete, it’s a cruel joke. Of course, it could just be I’m too old. Maybe they will reappear once or if there are ever children in my life again.
I used to eat a lot of dino nuggets at my friend Kira D.’s house. Her mom kept them in the freezer and would microwave them for us at our beck and call. We never had them at my house; my mom said they were “made of fake crap.” But I relished all the fake crap Kira’s house had to offer—it was like going to the flea market, only everything was free. She introduced me to Bratz Dolls, Polly Pockets, Webkinz, and HitClips[5]. Her closets were full of Victorian nightgowns, moth-eaten fur coats, and old Halloween costumes. Her parents were the fun kind of hoarders. They only kept junk that was weird, antique, or nostalgic.
Our mothers met at a grocery store in Ambler, PA in the spring of 1996, when Kira and I were still just infants and, after discovering the coincidence of their babies’ names, exchanged phone numbers. Kira is only three months older than me but, in many ways, I thought of and still think of her as my big sister. She’s also an only child. Like me, she is prone to insurmountable spells of gloom that make her just about intolerable to be around. Like me, she clings to bygone eras and has trouble acclimating to the contemporary. Now twenty-five, Kira still lives in her parents’ house, where the walls of her bedroom are hardly visible through spider webbings of old dolls, toys, and childhood artifacts stacked on shelves and hanging from wires. She is, and has always been, incapable of telling time on an analog clock.
(four) GRANDMA DOTTE’S LETTERS
Recently, after a manic bout of housekeeping, Mom found an old piece of Grandma Dotte’s writing hidden behind a framed photo of our dead cat, Rascal. Apparently, Grandma wrote a little obituary for him after we put him down and Mom had printed and saved it. We keep finding these little reminders of Grandma lately—cards, letters, emails, and scraps of her unassailable Catholic school penmanship. Each time I encounter a surprise trace of her, I lose control of my facial muscles.
I told my friends about discovering Rascal’s obituary and they said things like, “Your grandma lives on through her writing,” and “It’s like she’s still with you,” neither of which is true. Rather, reading her writing makes her feel more remote, as though somewhere she is still encasing her thoughts in careful commas and signing off letters with loopy x’s and o’s; it’s just that I’m no longer the lucky recipient. I never worried about, or even wished for, an afterlife until I lost my Grandma Dotte. Now all I want to do is hang out with her, ask her what she thinks of all this shit going on.
When we went to the hospital to say goodbye, Grandma was almost unrecognizable. Mom and I walked into a room which seemed to be reserved exclusively for dying old people, and I saw a frightening looking woman with a cracked mouth and eyes that clung to the ceiling. I thought, Thank God that’s not her, then realized that it was. The doctors said she wouldn’t be able to understand anything we told or asked her, but still she squeezed my index finger once for yes and twice for no and every single response made perfect sense. I made some promises to her and I intend to keep them.
Kira D. and her family came to help clean out Grandma’s apartment the week after her death. We invited them to take as much weird, antique junk as they wanted. I took her laptop, committed to sorting through it and backing up all her files. Back at home, I scrolled through her documents and found a long column of files beginning with my name: KiraKiraKiraKiraKiraKiraKiraKiraKiraKira. She’d saved every email she sent to me over the last couple years. All there, organized by date and subject. I still haven’t opened a single one.
(five) SEASONS IN THE SUN
Mom and Dad have been retired for a long time now, but not by choice. Retired is a gentle, inaccurate word for what they are. Their bodies are no longer fit for making money. It’s what they get for waiting so long to have their first and only child—they abandoned the facade of stability as soon as I became an adult, just like I abandoned red-haired Ruby. Mom wants me to hold her head in my lap and dive headfirst into her very real, very unmetaphorical pain; a pain I hope I will fail to inherit. Dad no longer wants anything at all, except maybe to win the lottery and open a combination motorcycle parts shop and table tennis club. As for me, I want to listen to Édith Piaf on a one-way flight to the year 2007. None of us are on the correct timeline anymore; we’ve had to adjust to disintegration.
I’m beginning to understand that nothing I planned is going to happen. The world I’d planned for caved in on itself years ago, and I didn’t even notice. Certain conspiracy-minded individuals think we entered an alternate reality in 2016, citing the Mandela effect[6]. Likewise, an alarming number of teenagers on TikTok seem to believe that they can actually shift realities at will—by scripting backstories and then entering a meditative state—and are using this newfound metaphysical ability to visit the magical world of Hogwarts, motived, I suspect, by the moral and imaginative bankruptcies of their own waking realities. I’m inclined to believe in these kinds of theories, at least a little bit.
Loose scraps of memory slide indiscriminately around these days. I feel less and less inclined to contain them, though I can count on people like Kira D. to collect certain lucky oddments and stack them up like trophies on a shelf, temporarily rescuing them from the vacuum of time. It’s not that there is no order, but that order is not necessarily beautiful, just, or obliging. Order may be ugly, arbitrary, and bitter. Order often involves annihilation. Why is there something instead of nothing? When I find myself waiting around for extinction, I listen to Loudon Wainwright III’s advice on swimming: hold my breath, kick my feet, and move my arms around.
[1] Jersild, A. T., Markey, F. V., and Jersild, C. L. Children’s Fears, Dreams, Wishes. Ch. Develop. Monog. No. 12. Teachers College, Columbia University, 1933.
[2] Svendsen, M. Children’s Imaginary Companions. Arch. Nerol. & Psychiat., 32: 985, 1934.
[3] Going to sleep at 5 a.m. and waking up three hours later; pouring wine into my cereal; seducing strangers from the internet several times a week, pretending to be married, and then never speaking to them again; ignoring my mother’s phone calls; allowing food to rot on my bedroom floor; etc.
[4] https://youtu.be/TrVKfRH_v3I
[5] You know, those junky little keychain devices that played ultra-lo-fi one-minute clips of pop songs like “I Want Candy” and “…Baby One More Time.”
[6] If you use the internet, you’ve probably already encountered this term—essentially it describes a phenomenon of false memory that makes people question mundane details, such as whether Curious George had a tail or not, the spelling of the Berenstain (Berenstein?) Bears, and the appearance of various logos and iconographies of the past.
A Philadelphia native, Kira K. Homsher is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, where she has edited The Minnesota Review and The New River. The winner of Phoebe Journal’s 2020 nonfiction contest and a two-time finalist in CRAFT’s flash fiction contests, her writing also appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Passages North, X-R-A-Y Lit, and others. She is working on her first short story collection. You can find her at kirahomsher.com and tweeting @bogcritter.