prompt word "friendship" title "imaginary friends" in misc. flash fiction

Sometimes, since my father’s passing, I can hear his advice in my head, I know what he’d tell me because he was a force of personality, because I knew him well, because he helped raise me. Like much of my generation, I was raised by three parents, my mom, my dad and the television, under those influences I became the man I am today, for whatever that’s worth.

I’ll be puzzling about writing or just my life and when I consider what I should do, I hear what he would’ve told me. “Just ask if you can kiss her, worst she can do is say no” maybe, though I don’t, so as not to risk the friendship, “just write the resume, worst they can do is say no” maybe, even though I don’t as I can’t risk reinforcing feelings of inadequacy by failing again. Or so on. Those are just two trenchant hypotheticals, of course.

I think “I wish I could believe this was his spirit talking, instead of just knowing what he’d say”. He wasn’t a religious man and he didn’t raise me as one either, so as much as I’d like to believe there’s a thing inside that goes on beyond, I’ve seen no evidence thereof. An agnostic imagining another agnostic communicating with him via cosmic woo-woo is the sort of absurd paradox that made him laugh out loud and, as his son, I have to laugh too.

It may come as no surprise, I was an odd kid, desperately wanting to be considered equal to the adults, teaching myself to read the newspaper at five in hopes of being taken seriously, trying to learn comedy since the grown-ups laughed at Carson because he was so smart, I just needed to be so funny that they’d take me seriously, I reasoned out.

In sitcoms, kids always seemed to have imaginary friends, this was normal on the television and so I decided pretend to have one myself, decided to have an imaginary-imaginary friend, maybe they’d respect me then. I named him “Fred” and I tried my best to keep up the act, but I’d always forget and falter. “I sat where Fred was supposed to be,” someone would remind me, “why didn’t you introduce Fred?” Everyone called me on the ridiculous fake-fake I was trying to perpetuate. My brother Dan made up an imaginary-imaginary-imaginary friend to mock my pretensions, he named him “Derf” because that’s Fred backwards. I was such a weird child that I couldn’t even imaginary-friendship right.

Now I am a weird man thinking “I wish I could believe this was his spirit talking, instead of just knowing what he’d say” and you know what? I know what Dad would say to that too. He’d say, “does the difference really matter?” He’d say, “I’m with you, be it by magic or by memory, I’m with you so what does it matter how?”

Last updated February 07, 2019