imaginary friends

I used to have an imaginary friend. I think that having an imaginary friend is one of the strangest things a person can do, but I the thing is I never chose to have one. She was just there, like a real person. Her name was Katie and she was about my age (which was maybe three or four years old).

I don’t know why I imagined Katie. I did have real friends (really!) and I had more than enough fun playing around with them. Katie was just another one of them… except that no one else could see her.

My gran always tells the story of how Katie told me to hide in her big wooden wardrobe one day. It’s a true story. She was a bit of a trouble-maker, that Katie…  She told me to hide in the wardrobe until someone found me, which seemed to me like the most ingenious idea in the entire world. So the three-or-four-year-old me climbed into the door, sat on some old saris and shoes, and hid with Katie for literally hours. Little did we know (actually, maybe Katie did know, now that I think about it) that downstairs, pandemonium was breaking out as my gran, aunt, cousins, and their neighbours searched the entire house and street, looking for me.  My gran always tells this story, and she always blames me, which I think is a little unfair. After all, Katie was the orchestrator of the shenanigans (I love that word) and even though Katie was a figment of my crazy imagination, I cannot be held responsible for her – she was a loose cannon!

I still think imaginary friends are weird, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I had one. It’s crazy and amazing how the human mind works, even when we’re so young we can hardly form proper sentences.

 I love my imagination. It's one of the reasons I am never bored; it makes the world a much more exciting and beautiful place to live in.