My Imaginary Girlfriend
I think I'm in love with you? You're just so cool...
I can see her now.
She is an almost iridescent pale. Sometimes she is rail-thin and diminutive, sometimes she is tall and imposing. Sometimes it’s a white tank top, sometimes it’s an oversized pitch-black hoodie. Sometimes she looks directly at me, but usually her gaze is fixed upon something else, some neon star that sits an impossible distance behind me. And always, in every form she takes, her hair is dyed a shocking fuck-you fire-truck red.
She is my imaginary girlfriend and she has been living in my brain since I was five years old. I must have seen her in a TV ad or a magazine or an music video or something. I remember picturing her in the hallways of my elementary school- this ephemeral adult woman who looked like Edward Scissorhands’ cousin, and who was inexplicably dating me, a kindergartener. I think even then I appreciated the implicit absurdity of the scenario.
As the years went on and my body caught up to my brain, her face began to shift. She took on the shape of my babysitters, then the disembodied fragments of my early and fraught experiences with porn, then eventually my classmates, once their bodies began to resemble the shape that had formed so early in my mind. Once when I was in seventh grade, I had a sleepover in my friend’s backyard, and I spent the entire night talking to a girl I barely knew. The next day, my friend told me that she had a crush on me. Suddenly I had a choice- would I try my hand at meeting a real person, a real girl who at the tender age of eleven decided that my existence was worth noticing and appreciating? Or would I continue my affair with an imaginary woman who was always just out of reach, too old and too cool and too free to even notice me?
I told my friend’s friend that I’d have to think about it. Later that day she told me not to bother; she was over it.
I am twenty three years old and the specter of my imaginary girlfriend still looms over me. As I bounce between rocky and precipitous relationships with real people, I see her creeping into their eye sockets and mouths. I see her shadow forming on the wall, getting larger and larger the more time I spend with any particular lover. Her tendrils always seek a suitable vessel to give her what she lacks- warmth, depth, a beating heart.
Sometimes I think that your whole life is spent on one side of a camera or another. Are you the one projecting a fantasy onto me, or am I the one projecting a fantasy onto you? Is it better to be adored and imaginary or invisible and genuine? It’s the subject of the photograph who is immortalized, but it’s the wandering eye who experiences this flattened monument, whose cunning and ambulatory mind can live within it. Who is more real? Is it our visible and corporeal form that defines us, or as Kurt Vonnegut says, the “unwavering band of light” that guides our attention?
Around the time I was seventeen I decided I wanted to pay attention to how I dressed. I cut most of my (unreasonably large) collection of graphic tees, almost all in some shade or another of navy blue or dark gray or black. I started to try flannels and button-ups and, most shocking of all, colors like green and yellow and red- colors that might accidentally cause another high schooler to look at me. Since then I have worn getups more ostentatious and skimpy than that seventeen-year-old could have ever imagined. I grew into my vanity over time, tended to it like a budding plant. All these years later I am finally proud of how I look, something that I could not claim for the vast majority of my life.
Through relationships and experiences and altogether too many mirror selfies I have finally allowed myself to step out in front of the camera. It’s not just that I want to be seen and fantasized about, it’s that I’m doing the work to make myself an object of desire. It’s not enough for me to be solely a consumer of beauty anymore.
The world is full of people who have an iridescent spark deep within them. Then, there are the select few who have built the performative muscle and become luminous on the outside as well. Their lives are defined by being perceived, being loved as a brilliant illusion. Frank Bidart says what you love is your fate- if what you love is to be adored, then that becomes your fate, with all of its shimmering upside and sometimes horrible aftermath.
When you spend a long enough time on the side of the camera with the viewfinder, you start to develop strange ideas about the people on the side with the lens. You start to imagine that they are all they say they are, that their effervescent luminosity is no illusion and that each moment in their lives is as perfect as the picture. You start to imagine that happiness lies on the other side of that lens, that if only you could shine brightly you would live within the Norman Rockwell painting instead of just looking at it.
The truth is, of course, that all photographs are a collaboration between the camera guy and the subject. We work together on this illusion, this projected self. It’s tempting to imagine that my imaginary girlfriend is really out there, and that if I can find her in the right place at the right time, I can live deep within the folds of her pitch-black hoodie. But to place the burden of this picture on another unwavering band of light is to set us both up for failure. It is cruel, in a thoughtless and uncaring way, to assume that anyone is defined by their best moments.
We are all just flabby, stupid humans. If I ever want one of them to stick around me for a long time, I need to dump this ghost and learn how to move on. She never did anything nice for me anyhow.