Member-only story
My Imaginary Lover
What’s the harm in loving someone no one else can see?
It was the middle of the night, and I was sitting at the kitchen table next to a man no one else could see. The kids were asleep, and I was staring at an empty search engine on my laptop, trying to work up the nerve to see if the man’s presence in my kitchen was the symptom of a brain tumor, schizophrenia, or something worse — something that would mean they’d take the children away.
I’d been driving them home from daycare when he’d first materialized in the passenger seat of my car. “Materialized” is as misleading as saying he “appeared,” but how else to describe a vision of an invisible thing? It was more that he occurred next to me as I drove, and that I didn’t see him so much as sense a presence as palpable as my two toddlers in the backseat, the vision as clear as if he were there in the flesh. He was breathtaking. Classically handsome in a way that reminded me of an ancient Greek statue: square jaw, cleft chin, eyes the color of a lake under cloud cover. If I could have designed my ideal lover, it would have been him.
The man in the passenger seat could communicate with me — not by reading my thoughts so much as silently communing, my questions arising in tandem with his answers. Who are you? contained it’s me, just as what do you want? contained you. I felt a…
