…they start talking. These voices tell me, over and over again, “I love you. I am here. You are so beautiful. I am with you.”
Let me be clear, these are not voices in my head talking to me telling me to do things. I can say with full confidence I do not have schizophrenia or multiple personalities.
But as soon as I am alone they are my refrain. My imaginary friends, my “Katie Morris'” (for Anne fans…). When I was young I sang to an adoring audience in my bedroom. I can’t possibly remember the first time I did that… I know I had a small record player… I know I memorized John Denver’s greatest hits one side and the other. I must have been… 4 or 5?
In high school, I’m sure I had this refrain in my head as I moved down the hallway, or sometimes in classes. I felt (indeed, I was) so targeted by one asshole in my school – and his antics drove a barrier between me and anyone else who might have been my friend at that time. I kept my chin up and commanded a certain kind of respect, I think, but friends were few and far between until my senior year when a couple of people in the year before me, and a few I’d made older than me, reached out. (CB, JS, SF, JG)
“I love you, Katanya.” The Refrain even has a nickname for me. I’ve had it for years. Sometimes it has a Russian accent. Don’t know why. Something about the exotic, the foreign… only someone so far away (who cannot really see me up close) could possibly love me.
I can only be loved in my imagination.
I have long, decades-long, relationships with men in my head. Sometimes it is them telling me they love me and want to build a life with me. I want to crawl inside them and live in that protected space. But this is different than “The Refrain”. The Refrain starts as soon as I am still. As soon as I am in between two destinations, as soon as I am unoccupied. As soon as I am idle. Is The Refrain the same as the audience in my head when I sing? I think it may be… but I’m not sure. It is so much more individual. Someone I’ve been living with all of my life. To say that I long for that voice to be real is massively understated. I believe I’m trying to think it into being every day. Like a chant. It has been my mantra as long as I can remember. Only recently have I wondered what it means for my sanity, my self-identity, and actualization.
The decades-long relationships with imaginary ghosts are something else. I say ghosts because though the objects of my imaginings were real, the relationships were not. They feel like hauntings.
First, it was T. Only two years older than me and the older of the twins (the youngest of 5 in the household where my Mom dropped me for babysitting in the mornings before work, where I went after school). I must have pages and pages of my journals covered with hearts and I <3 T’s and True Love Forevers with his name. I have him all worked out in my head, this person, this lover, this partner of mine. This person who I felt so deeply that I *knew*, really knew and understood. I looked for him as soon as I got “home”. Followed him around if he was there, pined after him, listened for him to arrive if he was not. The memory of it, of looking at myself in that state, feels horrible. It was so inappropriate. To this very day, in my late forties, I imagine myself with him, in this long-term relationship. “I always knew who you were going to be to me.” I’ll say to him.
Then there was S – who I met when I was in junior high school when he was in 9th grade. He’s the one who saved my life. I would not have survived the day that JF (the bully) destroyed my flute before band practice. I did everything I could to keep my head up. “I love you. You are so beautiful. I love you.” I borrowed Mr. T’s spare flute that he kept inside his desk, I played like nothing was wrong. For some reason I thought that JF was in the audience, having study hall in the auditorium, watching me for cracks. I don’t know if he was, or if that was an imagined audience, my internal, externalized, judge.
S turned into the class clown that day, a tenor sax sitting right behind me. He’s usually quiet. Always smiling, but rarely in the limelight. But that day he made us all laugh so hard we nearly peed, including the teacher. Including me. I wasn’t sure he was doing it to save me, to keep me from falling irrecoverably into oblivion, but it felt like it. It felt as vital as CPR; As oxygen. When we became friends later in life, before he gave me away to B at my wedding, but after he’d caved in to my determination to win him over, he confirmed that he’d done it on purpose. Recognized the state I was in and launched into what effectively became my earliest introduction to stand-up comedy.
Before that admission, I’d obsessed over him. The notebooks, the imaginary Rendez-Vous, the relentless (real) phone calls to his house, trying to convince myself they were deep and meaningful. I must have spent the next 10 years imagining our life. Then, abruptly, I decided I needed him to be a real friend. A real human, with agency, not a spector just over my shoulder, protecting me. We went on a road trip together across the country when I was in my 20s. And if ever we were going to hook up we would have. But we did not. I chose that he would no longer be a fantasy.
Now it’s W. Even when I am married, I am with him all the time. My thoughts my feelings my presence is only ever with the absence of his. I kiss him in the closet where no one can see me. I hold his hand when I’m in the car alone, sometimes even when B is driving. I breathe in his breath, centimeters from his mouth, whenever I need to feel him with me. (AND this is kind of creepy, but yesterday he had surgery for a ruptured appendix. Over last night I dreamt that we were catching up, that he was delighted to see me, and then he literally disappeared – vanished right in front of me within a moment.) I constantly tell myself he is my future. I tell him, in many many of our imaginary conversations, that I know we will end up together. That we are just for another phase of life. Though I am positive he is not healthy for me (he is not a great communicator, and that ends up playing out as gaslighting, subtle passive manipulation and silence until submission.) Though I am positive our families are not a match. Though WE ARE MARRIED TO OTHERS.
Any way I play it though if I’m so very present in my imagination there is no way I’m present with my husband and family. I’m more engaged with my own spectral dimension than in my actual one.
I need to be more present with B. In order to do that do I need to give up the Refrain? Do I give up my ghosts?