My first imaginary friend was a bluebird, directly lifted from a favourite storybook, with the power of speech and flight, much needed in large families. Another was a baby although I had a baby sister. This imaginary one was bullish and argumentative. I admired it immensely. There was a mother, although I had a mother. I think I just liked the ability to keep my mother in my head, direct her a bit and not share her.
Creatively I now conjure back lost people to fill or expand the gaps. My dead father is now my imaginary friend. The reality when he was alive didn’t stack up.
I inherited his art school portfollio, letters written to his closest friend, poems, lists and journals. I have the lovely poems he wrote for me, his funny postcards and random letters. I have disposed of the later retorts and refrains; it can be a truth when a writer is born in a family, the family is finished. It depends what you want to remain as a legacy. So my collages sometimes include his work and my poems will sometimes include one or two of his lines, words and imagery. Something shiny and new from something gloomy – images and texts of the past becoming imaginary friends – memorials to the dead, symbols of memories carried from childhood and education, from station to station, a reinterpretation – companions.
My mother who died when I was 26. I can conjure her back.
Make imaginary friendships that never evolved in reality.
I can imagine myself and characters wearing different jackets, imagining personas, swapping identities.
Our family did not keep to the norms of other families that I knew and maybe my imaginary friends allowed me to keep some sort of order until such time I felt I had some influence and control. My mother once asked if my imaginary friends were malevolent. I tested it out and one friend never returned, put out by my engineering. Imaginary friends can be like that; over sensitive. They all drifted off in a huff eventually. I’m bringing them back for a while and stealing their super powers, that’ll teach them.
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