You’re Scaring Me

I used to have this imaginary friend, his name was Daniel. I named him after myself. I went everywhere with him. I brought him to school, to play outside and possibly everywhere else.

And in all that time, I kept him secret. My parents thought that I had a best friend at school and the name thing was a coincidence. I didn’t have any friends at school, I just sat at a corner reading a book to Daniel. He couldn’t read, but I did. I suppose I created him like that so someone appreciated that I could. I suppose, in retrospect, that nobody in class noticed me and that the teacher simply thought I was practicing my reading. Nobody knew Daniel existed. But it was alright, at least I did.

I spent an inordinate amount of time with Daniel. He said some of the funniest things ever, he knew how to crack jokes and do magic tricks. And I knew that if he was real, there was no way that he could still be friends with me. He would have went with Lawrence or something. So I was thankful he wasn’t. I was kid, I was selfish.

Soon, my parents discovered Daniel. They said they heard me talking to myself in my room, laughing at nothing. Then they realized no one at my class was named Daniel as well. They freaked out. I mean, not literally, but I could tell, they were worried. They started insisting on me going out with kids from school or getting me to join a club or the drum line. But then they realized it wasn’t working; they got a psychiatrist.

I met Dr. Gomez in her office when I was 8. She was a fresh graduate, top of her class at a prestigious university and a very beautiful woman. My parents thought that I was too old for imaginary friends and Doctor Gomez agreed. During our first session, she asked me about my friends in school and I told her about Daniel. She kept asking about him, details, very specific and so many. We spent an entire hour with her just asking questions like what color is his hair and his last name. What she didn’t know, was that Daniel always went with me for sessions as well. I sneaked him in every time. So if there was something I wasn’t sure about, I would look at him and check if I said it right. As you can imagine, I always was. Doctor Gomez started me on some meds.

For the next sessions, Doctor Gomez asked me to recount stories between me and Daniel, how we met and stuff like that. I could answer them all perfectly. I said we met in some foreign country and other things like that. Doctor Gomez pointed out some irregularities with my stories like the fact that I had never been out of the country before and some of them sounded like scenes in the movies. I didn’t know if I was allowed to be angry or confused, so I just shut up. Daniel cried once or twice in the sessions.

Then one day, I was four months in therapy. I was playing with Daniel. We decided to play hide and seek. But instead of the house, we just stuck to the room. Daniel had this idea that we only had three guesses of where the other person was. That way, we didn’t break anything because we didn’t need to run and move a lot. You get points by getting the other person to use all three guesses without finding you. Most points win.  I was it for the first turn, so I counted to twenty, guessed cabinet, bed and door but he was not in all three. The rule then was to get out and yell, “Haha, I’m a Ninja!” and surprisingly, Daniel still hadn’t come out. I continued looking and thought it was one of his practical jokes. He liked playing pranks (like the time he made me think I broke my mom’s vase but he magically fixed it). I searched the whole room and found no sign of him. I got scared and looked again, I was yelling, “this isn’t funny” and “You’re scaring me”. And at that point, I had wanted him to go out and burst out laughing at my tears saying something about me being too old to cry. I was terrified, I thought something in my room had taken him. I was so scared of the nothing that surrounded me that I feared everything. Every sign saying he wasn’t there freaked my almost pubescent mind.

I tried to call his parents that night and dialed a pizza place. I went over to his house, it was a hospital. It was then that I realized he was imaginary. He was never real.

I’ll be 20 soon. But last night, I dreamt of Daniel. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t thought of him in almost a decade. In that dream I saw myself in room that day. I was playing with Daniel, but instead of the scene I see in my head; the one in which I’m alone, panicking because the meds and therapy finally took effect. I saw Daniel and he looked exactly as I remembered him. I saw him hide in the cabinet. I saw my younger self opening the cabinet. Daniel smiling and laughing but surprised when I just moved to look under my bed. He was pulling me trying to touch me and yelling the same things I would be yelling in a minute. “It’s not funny” “You’re scaring me”. And the horror in his face when he realize the truth that would take me weeks to understand. He realizes that he was not real. And while my younger self ran out crying, I saw Daniel sit by my bed and curl up. He tried to do a magic trick with one of cards but couldn’t and he began to cry. And I try to touch him, to yell and a say I’m sorry. For making him think he was real and all of a sudden denying he exists. But then my clock wakes me up and I get up.

I thought about Daniel today. I thought “what if he never went away?” Stayed the same, never growing old. Or did I make him disappear when I realized he was not real? I thought about what he’s doing now. And I thought….