Imaginary Struggle

“If I were held at gunpoint at the end of a thousand different lives, I would not change my mind. The truth sits on the tip of my tongue, but I would take another nine hundred and ninety-nine bullets in my forehead to not admit the truth.”

Deep down, he knew his mother never loved him. But he would not let himself admit the truth, not even in the depths of his heart. He scribbled these words below a sharp sketch of a beautiful woman on the endpaper of his yellow-covered notebook. With his eyes closed, he then leaned against the bench to comfortably support his head, submitting himself to the peaceful rustling of the autumn leaves. 

“You swore you’d never come back, Miles.” said a voice out of the blue. With his eyes now wide-open, Miles looked around to spot a very familiar figure, resting alongside him on that same bench.

“Clockster...” Miles murmured to himself in a mixture of worry and confusion, “years of medication and you still haven’t gone!” 

Clockster shrugged indifferently and paused for a moment’s thought. He then moved closer to Miles, whispering in his ear: “You’re not back for your mother, you’re back to say a final farewell to your dying hometown. You’ve stopped loving your mother the day you realized she never loved you back.” 

“It was her mental condition that destroyed her…” Miles heaved in the wind-driven silence, only to be interrupted by the creaking of the long-ago abandoned playground swings.

Clockster went on to bring more despair to him: “It wasn’t her mental condition alone; your mother was a monster by nature. She has scarred you for life both physically and mentally but never pitied you… she was your mother…”

Mile’s sudden yell, accompanied by a ferocious stamp of his hand onto the back of the bench, interrupted Clockster: “She is my mother!” 

An eerie sort of quiet ensued. Miles didn’t know what else to say; he felt a painful lump in his throat. 

“She called you a mistake. Not once. Not twice. But eleven times. Think about that Miles…”

As his imaginary friend Clockster faded away like fairy dust, Miles was stranded completely alone in an abandoned playground. 

“It’s been sixteen years…” he whispered to himself.

“Sixteen…” he reiterated, staring at his wristwatch. Half an hour had passed but much like his mother, Miles never had a correct sense of time.

Sixteen years ago, on a remarkably cool day in June, thirteen years old Miles Rogers was driven to the point of making himself scarce from his home. But now that his mother—an alcoholic, mentally ill domestic abuser—was nearly gone, Miles returned to say a final farewell to his terminally ill mother. Bruttensvile, a town of ten thousand had experienced a sharp population decline since the 1969 steel factory accident. A large wastewater reservoir heavily contaminated the river Drainey—the only source of fresh water to the otherwise deserted town. Eleven years later, the population had halved and was expected to half yet again in the following years.  

“The good ol’ fortress of peace” he said to himself in a somewhat humorous way, tapping on a broken-off graffiti-covered plank suspended below the structure.

The fortress consisted of two wooden towers bonded together with a narrow rope bridge. The steep ladders which led to the northern tower had been broken off, but Miles was now tall enough to peek through the second floor.

“Ah, the hideout from my mother, back when I was too young to understand what was going on,” he thought to himself, sliding his palm along the wooden beam.

Miles’s imagination took full control over his consciousness. He came across a thin and frail kid tucked away in the corner of the northern tower, snivelling desperately with his face planted deep into his knees. Moments later, a young boy with hazel hair walked up to the beaten-up child to provide some much-needed reassurance. 

“This is where I met you, Clockster” he added in his thoughts, glancing as his young imaginary friend raised a helping hand to the crying child. That miserable kid in the corner was him. 

For one last time, he got to see his imaginary childhood friends: General Bletan, Sir. Southy, the Merchant Kid, the King of Tiles, Astronaut Jeremy, Dr Steinway, Nicholas the Prince of Cakes and Clockster. Miles then visited the old roundabout, the place where he would hang out with his imaginary first love: Rosie. It would take him years of intense therapy and medication to erase the lifelong mental scars and sharpen the blurred line between imagination and reality. But now, his imaginary friends, the byproducts of his deep childhood trauma, were striking back altogether like terminal lucidity; they cracked through the chests to unleash the long-ago buried memories.

Miles suddenly felt alone. He felt confined to a cell without iron bars and a prison without the warden, alienated from everything he so desperately cherished about the real world. He felt as though he was dissolving painlessly through the playground; his human characteristics were bound to rot away like the sails of a long-sunken ship; he felt himself slowly merging with eternity, becoming an indistinguishable element of an eerily blank canvas. 

Miles struggled to regain control over himself. It took him a few minutes to “snap back to reality.” When he was ready, he headed off towards him mother’s apartment. Miles was almost at the front door of his mother’s apartment when he suddenly felt a laminar flow of warmth that sealed his heart like a silk scarf. There was something spectacular about Rosie’s promising smile that comforted Miles like never before. As if straight out of a dream, Rosie, now sixteen years older, was standing by the fortress of peace, with her ocean-blue eyes curiously tracking his movement. Miles turned around for a moment, deeply overwhelmed by a strange sensation. He knew he was not okay; he knew that Rosie was not real, but none of that mattered anymore.

“Clockster was right” he said, turning around to face his mother’s flat, “You could have been my mother… but you chose not to be. It’s scary how easily I’ve changed my mind to admit the same truth for which I was willing to take nine hundred and ninety-nine bullets in my forehead.” Miles then played around with the oxidized number pad next to the metal handle. He never entered his mother’s apartment.

“No Clockster, I came here for something entirely different… what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts,” said Miles with a subtle but genuine smile on his face, the like of which he had not experienced in a long time. Years of intense therapy have gone down the drain, yet how easy for Miles Rogers to give up! But it was all right, the struggle of twenty-nine years was finally over. He closed the blinds to never let the reality beam through his consciousness again. Miles walked down the front steps, heading towards who would become his lifelong partner. He knew he would be happy, once and for all.  

A cold breeze emerged once again, whirling the autumn leaves up in the air, giving one final breath to the decaying town. Mile’s mother would peacefully pass away that same evening.