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Dear Jon,
It feels ridiculous to write a letter to someone who doesn’t exist.
It feels ridiculous to suddenly invent an imaginary friend when you’re past the age of thirty.
It feels ridiculous to hurt for someone who’s not real.
Here I am, though. A lonely, pathetic, thirty-one year old bloke who works in a school library and writes shitty poetry and doesn’t have any friends, crying and writing a letter to another bloke who doesn’t even exist. If you did exist, you probably wouldn’t like me. I’d be the only person to be rejected by their own imaginary friend. Hah.
I don’t really understand how this happened. It’s like you walked, fully formed, into my brain when I woke up this morning. God, I nearly made two cups of tea! I didn’t, though. I didn’t stop thinking about you, either. Couldn’t. I feel like I know you. I know you’re short and skinny and you have long, soft hair. I know you talk posh but it’s a tiny bit put on so that people will take you more seriously. I know you like your tea with milk and three sugars, although you pretend you don’t like it with sugar in, god knows why.
And I know I couldn’t stop thinking about you at work today. The year sevens are doing a project about earthworms at the moment, and while I was sorting the books for them, I invented this whole daydream about being attacked by a killer worm woman, and you were my boss and let me sleep at work because home wasn’t safe for me any more. It made me feel lo safe odd.
Anyway, I’m writing this in one of my poetry notebooks because obviously I’m never going to get to actually send it since you only exist in my brain, but I don’t know, this has all been so strange and intense, I felt like I had to write it down somewhere. And writing to you feels somehow better than just writing.
Maybe this will be the only letter. Maybe I’ve got it out of my system now, this sudden weird obsession with you. Maybe I dreamed about you last night and then forgot about it, but you lingered anyway. That sometimes happens with dreams, doesn’t it? It does with mine, at least.
Well, I’m off to bed now. Take care of yourself, Jon. I get the feeling you’re not always very good at that.
Martin