Keep the Faith

When I was seven, I had an imaginary friend.

His singing voice told stories. So whenever my mother couldn’t read me to sleep, he would sing to me instead. He would go missing from time to time. I called his disappearing acts saving the world.

I was foolish. I was a little girl.

He held my hand when I needed one to hold on to. His arms folded around me at night when I needed to hide from the monsters I still thought was in the closet. He pushed the swings at the park when I was alone but he refused to go on the see-saws with me.

He was a stubborn guy. He liked to say motherfucker a lot in front of my mother. He had a cute smile and the saddest and most enchanting eyes. He babbled on endlessly about comic books and he wrote a lot. He was always hunched over a piece of notebook paper on my old, plastic desk.

“This shit’s for grown up’s, Zero,” he always said.

“I’m more mature than you think.”

“You’re seven,” he rolled his eyes. “How mature could you be?”

And then he was gone. He never came back.

My family had to move away to some where far away. I didn’t miss anything – hell, I could barely even remember anything. I missed him. It seemed like being a cape-less superhero became his full-time job that he didn’t have time enough to be my best friend anymore.

Then one day, he was everywhere.

I laughed. “The asshole got famous without me.”