"You're here! You're here! What game do you want to play? Do you want to go down to the creek and swim? Do you want to play tag?" He was hopping from foot to foot, smiling a smile that proudly displayed his two missing front teeth. I grinned at his enthusiasm.
"Why don't we do all of them?" I grabbed his hand, but before we could take a step, a woman's voice rang out.
"Jun? Where are you going?" She appeared, first her head, and then the rest of her body as she made her way up to the small hill we were standing on. "I'm going to go play with my new friend, Carlo. May we go, please?" Jun's eyes wore a haunting sheen of loneliness as he gazed up to his scowling mother. "You know I don't want you far away from the farm. Who is this Carlo anyway?"
"He is." Jun happily pushed me towards his mom.
"Hello." I offered my hand. Jun's mother, however, saw right past me. Her face played host to several emotions - confusion, surprised, wonder - before shouting, "Where? I don't see him?" Her face reddened with a fear thinly veiled with anger.
"Here! Can't you see him?" Jun was bewildered. He was frustrated with his mother's inability to see his new friend. "Why can't you see him?" He's standing right in front of you!" His little chest heaved with each excited pant. As for myself, I simply stepped back a few paces and quietly observed the scene, a scene I had already witnessed a thousand times, with the thousand different little Juns and with a thousand different mothers. I was not surprised by each party's reaction; they were to be expected in my field of work. You see, I am an imaginary friend.
There are a thousand of us roaming the earth, but each child can only see one of us, only one who would be able to understand him the best. People, mostly parents, have these misconceptions that we aren't real just because they can't see us. Even we have a hard time explaining to the kids why other people can't talk to us as they do. What is real anyway? I get confused sometimes when parents tell their kids we aren't real. I know I'm real because I know I exist. I exist very plainly to these kids, if only for a few weeks, a few months at most. When a child plays with me, when he tells me his secrets, and when he accepts me as a friend, I could live and laugh and dream like any normal boy could. I would exist technically as a figment of his imagination, but I would be something more. I dry the lonely child's unshed tears at night; I shield him in his moments of pain. I hear the mute child's plea for affection, and I see the dreams the blind child paints in his mind.
That summer, Jun and I spent every moment we had together. We splashed along the shore while the moon hung full and low in the sky, climbed rocky hills together, and lazed around on flat, sun-warmed rocks by the river. We fell asleep some nights by the yellow curtain of the oil lamp on the floor of their hut, on the grass from the exhaustion of counting the stars in the sky. I traveled a lot of places that summer. I liked the little cave by the waterfall where we often pretended we were pirates guarding our hidden treasure and the rocky ledge overlooking the beach where we went to sometimes to eat, but I think I loved our little hill where we first met and often went to play the most.
As the summer ended, Jun began to slowly gather the confidence to play with the other boys from the other barrios. More and more days went by during which we wouldn't spend any time together. I would wake up to find him gone and patiently wait for him to return each night, He would then regale me with stories about things he'd done that day, promising me that we would do the same things the next day. I smiled sadly and waited in vain.
One day, while I was sitting alone underneath the tree on our little hill, Jun showed up with somebody, a boy who belonged to a barrio not far from Jun's. They were laughing over a joke Jun had said. Sitting just a few feet away from them, I waved to Jun a few times, but he didn't acknowledge my greeting. Jun's happy eyes danced from everywhere, everywhere but me, when, with a heavy thud of my heart, I realized he couldn't see me anymore.
This is the day each of us dreads - the day when our friend wouldn't see us anymore. We can't prevent this any more that we can prevent the rain from falling. Everybody moves on. Friends come and go. Some very luck people get to spend all their lives being with someone they love, but for the most part, everyone grows up. Life is a series of meeting people and learning to let go. Every moment spent together lives within our hearts. To be loved purely and unconditionally by someone, even for a little while, makes each day beautiful, but the knowledge that things won't always be that way and that there will come a day that both of you will have to let go is what makes each minute doubly beautiful.
Jun and his friends made a perfect picture - two boys standing close together laughing and smiling with the golden afternoon sun touching the two dark heads close to each other. I sat there for the longest time, as my vision blurred with tears fro the friend who couldn't see me anymore. Letting go of someone is never easy, especially when that someone was a best friend like Jun. I stood up quietly, forgetting he wouldn't be able able to hear me. I walked past him and left his friend and him as they watched the sun paint its slow drama across the horizon in dying bursts of oranges and reds while I made my way slowly down the hill.
Maxine is currently taking up Management Honors at the Atenedo de Manila University. She graduated from Uno High School in 2007.
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