Imaginary Friends

there was a disconnect. no one seemed to see or know my best friend but me.

the therapist said it’s schizophrenia.

I asked my therapist how she knew she wasn’t hallucinating me.

my psychiatrist seemed to feel I was in a deep state of delusion

I asked him how he knew he wasn’t delirious and was imagining he was a human in a human dimension pretending to be a psychiatrist.

everyone blinked at me in disbelief. my best friend blinked back and

we’d hide beneath the willow tree in my granddads backyard and mention all the ways we hope to better our character.

morals were daunting and so was everyone else but us.

we resided in a psychedelic trance. pushing the breeze into our lungs and swearing to never forgot that we must keep showing up,

we resided.

there came a week I spent in a mental hospital. still my best friend didn’t leave. she was there taking my prescriptions with me and crying in the shower stall until our lungs could open wider and we felt a piece of the shadows had been released throughly. I was afraid if I continued to cry, I would heal all of me

and my best friend would disappear.

she asked me how come I felt such a way.

I told her as I sat up in the hospital bed,

“because I made you appear. “

and oh, we feel so fragile.

i climbed walls in my dreams and I let everyone meet my best friend and they loved her

and suddenly I wasn’t so uncertain.

then I woke up and my best friend was sitting in the left corner of the room. she claimed they didn’t have another bed for her or another room in the hospital.

I claimed they certainly did and there was plenty of open beds down the hall. and there was.

she claimed none of them suited her. she shrugged.

I yelled at her for why she lied about the real reason she wasn’t in a bed like me and asked her in a blinding rage

how come the staff or other patients didn’t know of her existence and she just cried and shrugged.

I cried too.

the walls of the days widened. I felt more depressed and unwanted in the mental hospital than anywhere else. I decided the mental health industry had exploited society to use us as a product for the pharmaceutical companies. I decided I’d never go back to any hospital or take any more of the prescription meds or tell myself I was mentally ill. I wasn’t. not any more than anyone else around me.

my best friend supported me in this. she reminded me that my perception of myself wasn’t even accurate it was simply a perception and I began to view myself in third person. I left the mental hospital and my entire life became a movie.

one euphoric, dualistic film. the cinematic universe I existed in was equally terrifying and liberating. it was beyond comprehension heaven-like and also demented and it shocked me.

still those around me persisted in their worry about my best friend. still I wouldn’t hide her. she was saving my life just by existing.

my mother said it was okay to notice if I had a mental disorder. I told her that her rigidity in character was a mental disorder.

I never felt more free than when I was with my best friend.

2 years later, I came to the conclusion that in fact I had been hallucinating my best friend. it didn’t matter about the mental illness diagnosis the doctors gave me because I had still experienced my best friend as real. and nothing made more sense to me than to deny the temptation to make an identity out of her and how she wasn’t real in one dimension of reality.

she was real in another.

and she saved my life. she didn’t need to be a subject of reality to open the doors to my spirit and unblind me.