by Yoav Blum
“When you board the plane, you complete your life as a coincidence maker, and when you disembark from it, you begin as a person.”
“A person?” Guy asked tensely.
“A person,” said the attendant.
“You mean a real person, a human being, a mortal, a client of coincidences, all these definitions?”
“Yes, yes,” the attendant said, still with great patience.
“All of the coincidence makers pass through this airport and are then born as human beings?”
“You’re getting into the technical details with me now,” the attendant said, scratching his back. “In general, the answer is no and yes.”
“And that means?”
“Not all coincidence makers pass through an airport. Only you, because that’s how you chose to experience this. But yes, the next stage after being a coincidence maker is being a person.”
“And after a person?” asked Guy.
“Don’t push it,” the attendant told him. “Or, in other words, I have no idea.”
“Okay.” Something filled Guy with renewed hope. “So I’ll just bring my suitcase and board the plane.”
“The envelope . . . ,” the attendant reminded him. “Maybe you should first read what it contains.”
“I can read it on the plane,” said Guy.
“No, no, no,” the attendant told him, “you can’t take anything on the flight. You have to put it in the suitcase with the rest of your memories so that it too will get lost.”
“But I just received it,” Guy argued. “And it’s not exactly a memory from my life.”
“From the perspective of the procedure, it is,” said the attendant and gestured with his hand. “You can sit there and read. The flight won’t leave without you, don’t worry.”
“Okay,” said Guy, and he turned to walk away.
“And if by chance you think of what ‘the taste in the mouth’ is, six letters, tell me,” the attendant called after him.
Guy returned to his place and sat down next to the suitcase.
He felt something unexpected: a great sense of calm. To be a human being. He would definitely be okay with that. He could give up his collection of memories for something like that.
He would read the new procedures contained in the envelope, get himself organized, perhaps drink something (if he could create an airport in his imagination, he could also create a soda machine), and move on to his new life. Life number three. All in all, he was improving, right? This time, he would make better choices.
There was no stamp or address on the white envelope. Just his name, in small letters.
When he opened it and took out the bundle of pages, he was surprised to discover that he could identify the handwriting, and when he read the words, he felt his heart sink.
28
Dear Guy,
So where do I begin?
Apparently, there are two types of people in the world.
There’s the type who simply lives his life, focusing on the moment and what to do in it. When love comes along, he smiles at it and allows it to enter, but he isn’t really enthralled. He would’ve done fine without it, but it’s nice that it came.
And there’s the second type, my type, who feels like he’s longing his whole life for someone he has yet to meet, who’s constantly waiting for the moment when the longing will stop and someone will walk through the door. We look for meaning in every small gesture. A knock at the door, a stranger who passes by us in a crosswalk, a waiter who smiles—all are signs, all are options that must be checked out. Maybe suddenly, who knows, someone will come and fall exactly into the hole in our hearts, like a toddler who fits a triangular peg into a triangular hole, a square peg into a square hole.
So, then, in the park at the beginning of the course, even though we had just met a moment earlier, it was enough for you to say you were an imaginary friend for the alarms to start going off in my mind. It took about another two weeks, a few questions, some clarifications, and it was clear. Your stories about the past, the words you used, everything fit. And when you mentioned “Cassandra” for the first time, that was it—a round peg in a round hole.
And I—I had to keep quiet.
For a long time, I asked myself: What was the specific point in time when I realized that I was in love with you? What was the equilibrium point, before which you like someone and after which he’s the center of your universe?
It’s like catching the point when you fall asleep. You lie in bed and try to stay awake, but not too awake, and to be aware of the point when you cross the line into a dream, but then discover too late that you’re already inside it.
I have no idea why this happened and when.
But at least now I know that it won’t pass. Now I know that you’re stuck outside my door and will never enter, that an invisible fence of thorns stands between us, between my current love for you and your imaginary love, that there are things that don’t happen. I should have known.
Okay. I’m babbling. We’ll start at the beginning.
My first memory is of sitting on a soft sofa with an eight-year-oldgirl with green eyes leaning on my shoulder, waiting for me to stroke her hair. I had a different name, a different appearance, but I was already completely me then. And afterward, I stroked her hair every day for many days.
I stroked her hair when it started to thin out, and when it disappeared completely I stroked her bald head, and when she regained her health and the hair started to sprout again, I stroked her wonderful spiky bristles. And when she no longer needed my stroking, I disappeared from her life.
You know the feeling.
Yes, I too was an imaginary friend.
And at first, at the very beginning, I also loved every moment.
There’s a difference between male and female imaginary friends, apparently. Much more tenderness, generosity, and understanding is demanded of us. I loved this gentle way of giving, the way in which I could heal wounds that no one else could see.
At first I mainly accompanied boys and girls, just as you did. I strengthened and supported them, I said the right words. Later, to my surprise, a slightly different phase began.
As the years went by, I found myself being imagined more and more frequently by teenagers, by adolescents. And by men. They no longer wanted me to just stroke their heads. They wanted more. Some of them were looking for human warmth, some of them wanted a feeling of power, some of them wanted tender things, some of them wanted twisted and ugly things, and all of them had failed to obtain these things in real life, and so they imagined me instead.
As time passed, I felt more and more used. I embraced the children who wanted me as a friend, and I took consolation in the teenagers who practiced first love on me, but I hoped to quickly get past the moments in which I was a fantasy.
You understand, when I started all this, I had great plans. I planned to mobilize all of the strengths within me in order to change and support, and to be at the side of someone who needed me. But as time went by, I discovered that most of them didn’t even want me. They only wanted me to activate the plastic doll they put around me, the mask they forced on my face.
To change? To support? Be beautiful and let us imagine you as we wish. No one wanted to imagine me as I am, and I didn’t understand why. I’m not enough?
When you’re imagined in this way, you realize that the world operates differently. It operates according to the “I must have more” system and not according to the “exactly what I need” system. What I have to offer, no one wanted to take.
Even the most gentle and lonely men in the world didn’t imagine me as a human being, but only as something that helped them activate themselves. Most of them didn’t even call me by name. They simply dressed me in the character of a model they saw in magazines. Some of them gave me kitschy names from films they had seen. Only the children sometimes let me introduce myself and call myself by name.
And when they did, I introduced myself as Cassandra.
They
never loved me, those men.
Lusted, perhaps. Desired, definitely. Needed, undoubtedly. But that was it. It’s impossible to love someone who does and says everything you want, who responds to every hidden thought of yours. I was merely an extension of them; what kind of love is that? Love derives from friction between two people. Like matches, like an ice skate, like falling stars that light up when they scratch the air, we need friction in order for something to happen in our lives.
I tried to find cracks in the rules. Small loopholes that would allow me to make the things I did less empty, to be more than an imaginary friend, less of a doll with a vacant look. I studied all of the rules and regulations related to the world of imaginary friends. I discovered, for example, that it is permissible to say or do things that aren’t directly imagined, as long as they aren’t completely contrary to the will of my imaginer. It turned out that I could end a “meeting” as I wanted, and not as my imaginer wanted, under very particular conditions. So what? It was almost never possible for me to say no and disappear.
I discovered minor rules that appeared irrelevant, like, for example, that every imaginary friend is allowed to submit a request to become a “permanent friend” of a particular imaginer, and thus become the imaginary friend of only one imaginer. But I didn’t have anyone to request.
And then I met you.
An imaginary friend who sparkled like a diamond in a pile of rags.
What are the chances? Tell me, what?
I remember that after our first meeting, after you left, I remained there for nearly a quarter of an hour, with my small, cute Natalie absentmindedly imagining me, sitting next to me, my entire body trembling.
Someone I could talk with, someone who could understand what I was experiencing, someone I could tell things to, lean on, belong with, from the same small group, share a common language with. In my rosiest dreams, I didn’t think I’d find another imaginary friend, someone else who could be a friend.
And in the end, it turns out, you were not only a friend, but much more than that.
How did this happen? What captivated me? I have no idea.
The vulnerable moments in which you would raise an eyebrow before saying something you were unsure of; the fact that you were very firm, on the one hand, and would try so hard to be liked, on the other; your smell, elusive and unassuming; the way you spoke to your imagining child; your passion for finding meaning in everything you encountered.
Your rare smile, a bit too flat, yet somehow still captivating.
And your laugh.
The way your whole body awakened when you started to laugh about something I said, as if just then you were starting to live, and until then everything had been a dress rehearsal. A small, involuntary jump that turned into an embarrassed cough that became a hopeless attempt to keep serious, that transformed into sweet internal thunder that burst out from you, instantly turning you into a child in front of my eyes. How I love that laugh.
With that laugh, apparently, you got under my skin, without making any effort.
And perhaps that’s the way you cleared a drawer for me in your heart.
The fact that someone took a small step backward in order to give me confidence and allow me to see that he was on my side, and that he told me without words, come, I’ve emptied a little place here for you, for who you are, come put whatever you want here. And suddenly, I was no longer in familiar territory, no longer detached. There was no longer any plastic covering, no shiny mask.
Each time we met, I was sure it would be the last time.
My imaginer, Natalie, no longer spoke with me very much, and it seemed that the end of our period together was near. If you only knew how hard I tried to persuade her that we should go down to the park again the following day or the day after.
And each time we went to the bench and discovered that you were there, I felt like I was passionate with bashfulness. I never thought it was possible to combine such opposites, and yet I did. What a fool.
When we started to imagine each other, it was clear. I was deep into the realm of love.
I was never so sure of myself as when I submitted the request to make you my sole imaginer. Is that the point when you are in love? When you not only choose someone but also accept him ready-made? When you change something inside of you for him? Perhaps.
It was so simple: one moment we sat on that bench and talked, and the next moment, when you disappeared in the middle of a choking laugh, responding to the call of another imaginer, it was clear that I didn’t want anyone but you in my life. And that was the only way to achieve this.
I submitted, and I was accepted, and from that point Natalie no longer imagined me. Only you did.
Renaissance. A short and happy period. Bursts of happiness when you chose to imagine me sitting at your side, not using me, not putting words in my mouth, not making me do anything except be myself, just waiting to see how I would make myself real to you. How many imaginary friends can say they were imagined with such freedom?
How short this period was. When you broke the rules and told your imaginer something you were forbidden to say, you disappeared from my life. Both of us waited for each other, each one in a state of nonexistence. No one imagined you, no one imagined me. Time stopped. But when you returned, you didn’t believe that I had waited for you. You didn’t imagine me anymore. You gave up. So quickly. My little lazybones.
I know this today, after collecting bits of stories about what happened to you. But back then I only knew that I suddenly found myself on a bench, after finishing my role as an imaginary friend, and that I was now embarking on a new role.
You can imagine this feeling. To think that you’ve lost everything and you need to pave a new path, and then to meet someone, just a moment later, who says that he was an imaginary friend.
The moment you said that, I tried to shout that I was too, but I couldn’t. The words got stuck in my throat, as faint as dust, and I didn’t understand why.
Only later did things start to make sense to me. Lightning struck twice at the same spot. You were the same one for whom I had already fallen captive. On the first day of the course, the coincidence of my life occurred, but I couldn’t do anything with it.
You understand, because you were my official imaginer, that I was forbidden to reveal my identity to you. It was so frustrating, to slowly realize who you were, to hear you tell stories from the past that I already knew, to hear you talk about that “Cassandra” of yours, to evade your questions about my past.
To fall in love with you again, to be disappointed by you.
I made inquiries. I sent an official request. I asked for special permission to tell you who I was.
Three times I submitted a request. I filled out the long forms at night, trying to explain how unreasonable this was. The General gave me the responses in small white envelopes. Those were the only times I saw him express emotion.
“I’m sorry, ” he said.
They didn’t grant approval, of course. Officially, I was considered someone you imagined, but you weren’t considered someone I imagined. And that was it.
But I also tried other methods. I truly thought it would work out. We had already connected once before. You had already loved me. You could love me again, right?
After all, we had built this relationship once, one piece of trust after another. This was supposed to happen to us again. It was so natural.
It turned out that it wasn’t. That’s what I understand now. When I let you imagine me, I stole from you, and from myself, any possibility of being together in reality. Because you were no longer looking for me. You were no longer even looking for love. You were just stuck remembering, building castles in the air with the part of me that no longer existed.
Indeed, if I had gotten up one day and said, “I’m Cassandra”—I wasn’t able to do this, but let’s assume I was—would that have changed your feeling for me in any way? And if so, didn’t that mean the feeling itself would have been nothing
more than self-persuasion derived from the memory of who I once was?
Where was I in all of this?
But you loved me once—me, me, me. Why was I no longer sufficient? Because I wasn’t imagined? Why did you become someone who wants “more”and not “exactly,”like everything I fled from? Because I was real? Because I was there all the time, not dripping into your life only at the appropriate moments?
How did this happen?
You were the door toward which I fled. An imaginary friend like me, who understood the emptiness and the temptation to be someone else all the time.
And then, when I became real, you no longer wanted me?
How was I supposed to feel?
I’ll tell you how. That everything was a lie. And that today too, like then, actually, I don’t deserve to have someone love me as I am.
Yesterday evening, I understood everything. Finally.
You’re not here. You’re not with me.
You’re in love with an imaginary woman, and you’ll never allow yourself to give up on her for someone who exists, even if they are one and the same.
Until today, I dreamed about you almost every night.
I would find myself in an unfamiliar place, standing frozen and feeling you standing behind me, in the middle of a desert or on a cloud, inside a long tunnel, in thousands of other places. I always felt and knew that you were standing behind me. And each time, I would turn toward you, slowly, with enormous difficulty, as if a herd of horses was trying to stop me, and finally discovered that you were still standing with your back to me.
And when I tried to call you, you would disappear.
That’s the way it was in the dream, and if we’re honest, that’s the way it was in life too.
Last night, I didn’t dream about you. I’m releasing you.
I’m moving on, to the next role, whatever it might be.
And I wish you happiness with your memories and imagination, and hope that someone will one day succeed in breaking the spell you cast upon yourself. For your sake.
Still feeling the same thing,