THE WALL OF MY IMAGINATION


This typing to each other, but not really to each other, this impersonalized intimacy, its too twenty-first century for my twentieth century soul.

I told my friend about it weeks ago, that I was pained by what I felt or imagined that I felt and by how pleased it made me to feel it. She referenced Jimmy Carter, and in her eyes she laughed a little at me for being pained over my "sinning in my heart." I wasn't as pained as I was pretending to be. I was mostly just pleased.

I imagined that I liked you then, when we knew each other in the real world and never talked or touched more than holding hands and laughing about it, because it was silly and we didn't mean it. And I imagined that I liked you this time too, when we seemed to be telling each other everything, so intimate without any hope that we would ever even hold hands. Always I felt like I knew you and that you were for me. And of course you are. You only ever existed in my imagination. Why else would I have made you up?

I am writing notes to an imaginary person and I am hurt when he has a mind of his own and doesn't respond the way I would have him. So you see, I want you to stay imaginary. And I wanted to stay imaginary to you. I allowed you to believe things that you imagined that seemed to make you like me more.

But what good is any of this to me? I wanted to fall in love with you, and I wanted you to fall in love with me. It was tantalizing and distracting, but ultimately unsatisfying, then and again. Both times the real you broke through the wall of my imagination and let me know it was never going to happen.

When we first reconnected, I said that I was happy that I hadn't just made you up and that you actually existed in the world. With this final note that I will never send, I am telling you that isn't exactly a lie, but for me I am better off the other way around.

Goodbye secret imaginary boyfriend.



the love letter collection
submitted 11:05 PM EST
friday, december 21, 2007