Your Girlfriend is My Imaginary Friend

Nina Potischman

Three months after we broke up for the final time, I summoned your girlfriend and she came to me. I didn’t mean to do it. I just saw the picture you posted of her on Instagram, and then my desire formed the shape of a portal. You know the picture: the one with her hair thrown back as she lies atop your green armchair, a wine glass full of orange juice perched between her long fingers. It is an arresting image. Not because she is beautiful, though she is, with her face clean like a plate. Nor because of the evening light electrifying her pale arms, or your cat pressing his mouth into her thumb, or the drape of her silk dress across her splayed legs. Of everything, it is her look. Perhaps you know the one, which is why she sits in your armchair instead of me. She has the smile of someone whose cool indifference has been shattered, if only for a moment. I have caught you looking, she seems to say. And I am glad.

It happened two days after the picture, on the night she became your girlfriend officially. You fell asleep first and she lay there for a while, listening to your breath. Then she slipped from beneath her vintage quilt and crept barefoot to the fire escape outside her bedroom window. Sitting there, butt bare against the chilled metal, she saw my portal. It was not like normal portals. It was a cool portal: a big purple swirl of glitter with a perimeter of fluff like a cat’s mouth. Inside, she could see that I decked it out with fun girl things, like nail polish and katsu curry, and cute outfits and books I figured she might like. For good measure, there were four Valais Blacknose sheep and Robert Pattinson.

“Enter to hang out,” the portal said to her. It had a manly, rumbling voice. I thought that bit would be funny: a good test to see if she was worth it. She didn’t laugh as hard as I would have liked. Just a gentle tinkle. But she stood up, made a lasso motion, and pretended to pull on a rope. The portal laughed, deep like moss.

“You must come to me,” the portal said.

If you were awake, you would have seen her. Silk slip, the silhouette of moonlight. How she grabbed onto the railing to lift herself onto the other side, breathing in the chill November air. Then she jumped.

I am self-conscious about the whole imaginary friend business.

“It’s not weird,” your girlfriend tells me. “A lot of girls are doing it these days. If I don’t feel weird about it, you shouldn’t. If anyone should feel weird, it should be me.”

I don’t say anything. She stands in my kitchen still wearing her slip, shivering. I am wearing my grandfather’s old Coney Island T-shirt and I can feel my breasts swinging against my rib cage. I cross my arms over my chest and lean back against the cool white wall. She is short, coming up to my shoulder blade.

“The zeitgeist is shifting towards imagination,” she says, readjusting a spaghetti strap.

“I don’t know,” I murmur, not wanting her to see the full scope of my insides.

But of course, I let her stay.

The following Monday, your girlfriend and I go to Zumba at the Dodge YMCA. I wear the sports bra that my mom got me before Jewish sleepaway camp at age twelve. Not that I am the same size (I am a bigger size than when you last saw me). I just find exercise degrading and refuse to spend money on gym clothes. It would be like buying a silk garbage bag; how tragic, to let it sit in my hamper, fermenting in the garbage juice of my body.

“Your sweat is not garbage juice.” Your girlfriend is sweet, her voice deep and raspy like she has a cold.

I think she is worried about me, so I say: “I don’t hate my body in particular. I just hate bodies.” She nods, still nervous like she was when she left the portal. “But your boobs look amazing. The Dodge YMCA doesn’t deserve you.”

“Slander of the Dodge YMCA is punishable by death,” she deadpans. She does this death stare when she’s joking, which she usually is. I like this about her. I wonder if now is the moment to tell her that I was once your girlfriend and that you were once my girlfriend. Instead, I say: “If my body is a temple. It would be the Dodge YMCA.”

You might think that I would find it strange to dance next to your girlfriend, that I would resent her slim hips and loose hair, how she raises her eyebrows and bites her lip during the sexy parts, then blows her bangs out of her face, so it’s like a joke even though she moves her hips in rhythmic perfection. You might think that it makes me envision how her hips would look against your body, illuminated by the color-changing lightbulb I bought you for your birthday, and that the thought would make me nauseous, that I would take the pill I keep in my skull ring for that purpose, and that I would wash it down with my orange Gatorade.

But you actually don’t know me that well.

Okay?

Okay.

I make your girlfriend spaghetti bolognese with impossible meat, using my iron fish because we are both anemic. She is becoming more comfortable with portal travel. Sometimes, she sends me things: a possum that she grabbed with her bare hands at a park near her MFA program in Iowa. It flies through the portal at the speed that she threw it, landing perfectly on my couch.

Two hours later, when I track it down using Temptation cat treats, I undo the ribbon around the neck and the note.

“Hey slut,” it reads, and for a moment my blood is cold. But when I open it, there’s a drawing of the two of us wearing cowboy boots. “I have this weird desire to make a piñata. Do you want to make a piñata? Can we fill it with something insane?”

I write spiders on a piece of notebook paper, then crumple it up. I google: “Things that are insane.” You would have the answer, I think. Then I think: fuck you. Fuck you for always having the answer.

“Circle one,” I write. “Thunderstorms. Dicks. Time.”

What did she circle, you might ask? To which I’d say: she’s your girlfriend. Why are you asking me?

Sometimes, I think your girlfriend might be upset to know about you and me. For example, when she and I play with my sock puppets and pretend they are our penises. We make them bite each other, and when my sock puppet’s mouth touches her sock puppet’s neck (her wrist), she says: “Just to be clear, I have a girlfriend. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

I pull my sock puppet away and let it fall by my side, flaccid.

I know I could say: “It’s funny you say that because that’s actually how I found you.” I could explain about the picture you posted of her. I could explain how falling in love with the same person could be the greatest bond in the world, a fertile field of friendship potential. But you know how sensitive she can be about that stuff. It’s one of those things, like telling someone you have lice. We’ve been rubbing our scalps together for too long.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “They’re just puppets.”

“Okay,” she says.

“We can bite puppets,” I say. “But we can’t fall in love.”

I am trying to make her laugh so we can stop talking about this, but she lets out an exasperated sigh like I am a man yelling from across the subway platform. “Come on,” she says. She shakes her head and pulls away. She takes off the puppet and lets it fall to the ground. Then she sits on my bed, body curled inward like a horseshoe crab. I stand by my desk, one foot stacked on top of the other.

“Sometimes I say things just because I think of them, not because I mean it,” I say. “Do you ever get overwhelmed by the wonder of conversation? If I think about it too much, I’m astonished I ever think of anything to say.”

Your girlfriend doesn’t say anything to this. She just puts her head in between her knees and lets her arms hang loose like pieces of yarn.

“Love,” I say, feeling my desk press into my thighs. “That’s not what I want from you. Not like that.”

“So you want something from me?”

“Only this.” I hold up the sock puppet. She looks at me, those glacier eyes: wide, searching. Your girlfriend is the kind of person whose sadness is laden with meaning, with aliveness. She extends her puppet, allowing it to bite my ankle, though its mouth is softer than before.

“Tell me about your girlfriend,” I say.

She pulls her knee into her chest, then rests her chin there.

“I think I am falling in love.”

Weeks later on my balcony, I chug a Rasberrita as she expounds upon the unique texture of her feelings for you: how you are the first girl she has loved from up close, and she feels something grotesque in her desire for you. There is something ugly about the men she has dated that made them impossible to desecrate, and thus comfortable to want. And then there is you. You, with your sunscreen smell, your cold toes, your sharp elbows that scratch her in the night. Desiring you feels like ejaculating on a painting in a museum, not because you are a girl, but because you are so beautiful.

“Have you ever felt that way about anyone?” she says, and she tells me how hard you are on the outside, with your sea urchin skin and your icicle eyes. Have I ever fucked someone like that? The person one watches from a distance at a party, their chin thrust forward, hands in their pockets. One never expects them to be afraid, and then they lie in bed with that look, and you know that they are just there.

“How often are people like that just there, exactly the size of their bodies?” she says. “Do you know what I mean?”

I don’t reply for a long time, sucking on my joint.

“Sometimes I want to crawl like a groundhog out of the dirt of myself,” I say finally. I pass her the joint. She rests her chin on her knee and looks out at the park. She’s wearing a calf-length silk skirt; I sit in a chair that is wet from the rain.

She ashes the joint on the railing. “You want to be woken up from your wintry nap?”

I nod because I have nothing witty to say to this and my butt is wet. Is this the crucial difference between us? That her butt would never be wet?

“Would you see your shadow?” She’s smiling, hand dangling off the railing.

I shrug. There are too many questions I can’t ask her. Like, what is the right number of friends, and which one of us has thicker head hair, and who does she think gives the better massage, and how often does she think about me when I’m not there?

“Is everything okay?” She pokes me with her big toe.

I nod. I watch the park, the tickle of the leaves in the air.

“You act weird every time I talk about my girlfriend,” she says.

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

Your girlfriend and I stare at each other. She has this sad look, the kind you’d give an arthritic cat struggling to climb onto the couch. I do not even care about sitting on the couch, I want to tell her. You are pretending I would like to sit on the couch so that you can pity me.

“Well, maybe not everyone has a girlfriend,” I snap, and I stand up. “Maybe sometimes life is not about having a girlfriend.” I know I am doing the wrong thing, that she does not mean to hurt me, but I can’t help myself. How innocent she looks there, with her delicate eyebrows raised and her silver rings and her skinny fingers, and how she is ahead of me on her Goodreads challenge. She says my name, but it is too late and I have left her there.

There are few moments when I am not thinking about your girlfriend. When my touch screen stops working, save for the letter "X,” I go to the Apple store, and I think it looks like your girlfriend, all clean and see-through. Though your girlfriend is too cool to be an Apple store. Your girlfriend looks like if you could thrift the Apple store, which I’d tell her if she wasn’t mad at me for locking her on the balcony without the portal.

Which wasn’t my fault; that I forgot the balcony locks from the inside, and that the key was hanging by the door to my apartment. It was too late by the time I was lying on the floor of the bathroom, blasting the playlist you made during our first breakup: “:(” with my noise-canceling headphones—and so I couldn’t hear her calling my name. I couldn’t even hear her smashing my glass balcony door with my peace lily. My peace lily, by the way, is not okay.

I just emerged from the bathroom, and there was the glass and a note scrawled in Sharpie on my bedroom mirror: “YOU WILL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN.” Do you know how hard it is to get Sharpie off a mirror?

There is a joke here. I hope you will think of it.

For the days after the incident, I sit by my portal working on my novel: a bildungsroman about vampires at a liberal arts college. It makes me sick to look at the portal, but I can’t look away; it’s like a hot picture of a serial killer. I dream that she sends me a new peace lily, but when I touch it, my hand is covered in paper cuts. I call out sick from my job at the pet bakery. I become convinced that the dream is an omen, that she will send me a brand new peace lily, and throw it hard like the possum. I wait in the same spot on the couch that the possum hit just so I can catch it. It is hard to focus on my novel, imagining the peace lily smashing into my stomach.

“This situation should be an ad for my noise-canceling headphones, haha,” I write after five days.

Then: “You are my favorite best friend of all the best friends I’ve ever had.”

And: “Do you remember when we baked a challah together, and I said ‘he’s kind of hot,’ so you put a beanie on him? And then I put him inside of my black Dickies sweatshirt, and you gave him a pair of Carhartts with your carabiner, and I gave him a pair of high tops with the lace wrapped around, and you gave him a vape? And then you said he looked like a Sebastian? We were high, and so maybe that’s why I laughed so hard that I peed a little in my pants.

“Did you pee your pants too? Do you think there’s a God? How would you define love? (The last question is for a paper).”

The new peace lily comes at 4 AM and knocks my computer off my lap. When it hits the ground, the screen shatters. I imagine her years of softball, swinging her hand back to increase the momentum.

“If you lock me on your balcony again, I will cut your throat and bathe the peace lily in your blood,” the note reads.

On the other side: “Yes, depends what you mean, ( ).”

Your girlfriend proposes that we go to a coffee shop in Bushwick for our first hang out after “The Incident,” because she wants a “neutral ground,” where “no one can be locked out.” Fine. I leave my front door wide open when she comes through the portal. I see her toes first, all tan and smooth with white nail polish. She wears a black tank top, a long skirt with a stripe of hip exposed, and a charm bracelet, which she believes will make a comeback. She’s cut her hair to her collarbone.

“How are you so shiny?” I say. “You’re like a challah glazed with an egg wash.”

She gives me a tight-lipped smile. I shift my weight to my other hip.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” I say.

“No. You can.”

She walks across my woven carpet with her platform sandals. It is a shoeless house, which your girlfriend knows, but I say nothing. Perhaps your girlfriend has washed the bottom of her shoes.

“I am sorrier than a person who bought a couch full of bed bugs,” I say, looking down at my ragged toe cuticles. How embarrassing toes could be, all twisted and needy. She turns, pausing in my door frame. How strange that she is short, I think. Her body has six fewer inches of thoughts than mine. She narrows her eyes and stares at me.

“Because I will bite you?” she says.

“Yes.”

The afternoon light is gray, shadowed by my painted door frame. How beautiful she is, I think, as she nods and takes my hand in hers, lifting my wrist to her mouth. Prettier than me, though that is not the crucial difference. I want to ask you what the thing is, the thing that makes you love her and not me, even if I can feel it. I want the thing to be flat enough to be put into language.

Then she sinks her front teeth into the soft underbelly of my wrist, holding my eyes. I imagine shaking my arm, her teeth still lodged in my flesh like a dog in a cartoon. But I am frozen. I am here, I think to say, but I can only muster: “I think I have always been waiting for you.” She pulls back, wiping a bit of my blood from her lip with the back of her hand. It leaves a streak from the corner of her mouth to her cheek.

“Maybe.” She shrugs like it’s nothing to her. But I can see her dimple beneath my blood.

I attempt to ask about you. Questions like: “What do you guys talk about?” (Lately, the book you read together each week). “What are the books?” (Last week you read Henry and June by Anaïs Nin, which is funny, I say because I also love that book. I’m always telling people to read that book. Once, I dated someone who underlined all the parts of Henry and June that made them think of me. Which you actually did with her, which is hilarious). And: “What else is on the list?” (Capital Vol. 2 by Karl Marx, to which I say: I’ve always meant to read Volume One, and it’s a deep shame that I can’t get through more theory. To which she says: oh, Volume One is great, I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s surprisingly easy to read. And I say: Really? I’ll have to hold you to that! And if you’re wrong, I’ll use all my surplus labor to bite the living shit out of you! To which she says: I get this feeling you don’t understand surplus labor. And I say: oh, wow! Look at you, understanding surplus labor! Do you want a little surplus labor trophy?).

And then it is a while before your girlfriend speaks about you again.

Would your girlfriend tell me if you broke up? I don’t know. Sometimes I think she is trying to tell me by not following your Depop. Then you post a picture of the nape of her neck in front of a bridge in a European country that I wanted to visit with you, but every time I asked if you wanted to plan a trip, you made a tight line with your lips and played with your hairband. I measure the time you have been dating (six months) against the time that we dated (four years). Does that mean you loved me eight times as much? Probably, I decide, and I feel bad for your girlfriend. I wonder if I should tell her what you told me at the end: “I will always love you.” And: “I will always carry part of you with me.” You had just fucked me against the door of your childhood bathroom, mouth on my neck like we did at the beginning. Except I had wanted to look you in the eyes, and I think you sensed this because you didn’t. After, you slipped away and rinsed your fingers in the sink and I peed and the whole time you didn’t look at me. I watched as you applied Aquaphor to your eyelashes like I showed you, and I said: “The Aquaphor? Is that what you’ll carry with you?” It probably sounded like an accusation. It probably was.

“Yeah. That’s it.” Your voice was flat like a hospital heart monitor. I stared at the bathroom door. White, matte, except for two circles of my glistening sweat. I wiped it away with the palm of my hand and for a moment, I could feel the whole world in the base of my throat.

“Well,” I said. “That’s good. Eyelashes are very important.”

“What would it mean if she loved you eight times as much?” my therapist asks, but I cannot say.

Your girlfriend mentions that you are moving in together, even though you never wanted to move in with me, which is awesome and expected and I don’t care at this point. I have four hundred matches on Tinder and I sleep with a model who tastes like fish and can’t quite kiss me properly. After, he texts me: “I care about you really a lot,” and starts calling me in the middle of the night, and I feel so ill that I have to block him on every form of social media. So, who is winning? It’s not a competition, but if it were, who do you think would be winning?

I do not reach out to your girlfriend for three weeks. Not on purpose: every time I think of her, I just feel slightly sick. At the end of the third week, the portal spits a letter onto the floor.

“Have I done something?” your girlfriend has written inside of an Easter Card, even though we are both Jewish. There are two bunnies on the front, pressing their ears together. “I feel as if you are mad at me. But I keep running through everything, and I just can’t figure it out.”

I look at the letter. One minute later, I receive a box of chocolates. They are also shaped like bunnies. I eat them sitting on the carpet of my apartment. I stare into the portal, its swirling glitter-glue depths. Robert Pattinson is long gone and there is only one Valais Blacknose sheep. It walks towards the edge of the portal, and I press my hand against the sheep’s absurd black-nosed face. It nuzzles against me.

“I seem to be having a crisis of imagination,” I scribble on the back of the easter card. “I am sorry. Thank you for the chocolates.”

When I watch reality television, I think about how someone would edit our relationship to make it seem doomed from the start. The first time we traveled together: the summer after our sophomore year of college, and how we stood outside of your car in Death Valley, both of our phones dead. Your neck was wet with sweat and it was hot and dry like the butt of a cigarette. Your words, not directed at me, thrown down into the asphalt: “This isn’t how I imagined it. Not at all.” That night in the AirBnB, we hadn’t fucked in three weeks and you didn’t look at me. We just lay there and I stared at the ceiling and wanted you so badly. I thought if you brushed my arm, my bones would turn into lava and pour into your body. But you turned away and opened your book and I cried and you stood and turned up the air conditioner.

“What?” Your voice was hard. You thought I was crying to punish you. I turned over into my pillow. “What?”

Perhaps all crises are crises of communication. Is that interesting to say? Is anything?

Your girlfriend turns down an invitation to my birthday dinner because you are taking her to a figural sculpture class. I wait by the portal on my birthday. Even as people text me, and send me nice notes, like “THE QUEEN IS 26,” I do not feel like a queen because I cannot look away from the portal. I wonder if her present will reference an inside joke that we have. A baby Valais Blacknose sheep; a challah; a pint of my blood she has been collecting secretly in my sleep. Even a note that says something like, “Speaking to you feels like receiving an IV of feelings and ideas. Do you think there is a clear binary between the two? (Just kidding, obviously not. Excited for another year of asking you the right questions).” There is still nothing when I leave for my birthday dinner, so I send her a note: “I will miss you at my birthday dinner!” And when I get back there is still nothing. Twenty-six years ago, I had been sideways in my mother’s vagina for three days, about to burst into the world yellow and screaming with a lopsided scalp. How far I have come.

You do not text me either. Not that I expect you to. I think of the words I used to describe your smell: firewood, blackberries, nighttime. It is awful when you can no longer smell a word.

The next day, your girlfriend sends me a brief note: “Sorry I missed it. Hope you had a lovely day girlboss!”

Is that what brings you together, I wonder? That you both know how to wound me? I flip through my copy of Henry and June, and there is your handwriting. Blue and thin and slanted: marginal phrases like, yes and ugh and I want to take everything possible from life, like a chef that cooks a pig’s asshole with butter and garlic.

And then below, in my light pencil: I wish to gobble up the squeaky tripe of life, which I had texted you. I thought you would be glad that I had grasped you so well, that we wanted similar things from the world, but you said only: “Isn’t that basically what I said?”

“Do you think people are ever enough for each other?” I write on a blank piece of printer paper, then seal it in an envelope. “Do you ever feel like your body is a sinkhole of wanting? Where do things go when they’re done?”

I tie the note around the Valais Blacknose sheep’s neck and instruct him to give the note to your girlfriend. Three days later, when I see him again, the envelope is still there. I untie the ribbon. The seal has been broken, but when I open the envelope, there are only my words.

How many friends your girlfriend has. They post film photos of her on Instagram: dancing on top of a table in Berlin with her mouth open in laughter, like a scream; lying on a picnic blanket, surrounded by others with wrist tattoos in tiny shirts and loose pants. And then the one I cannot forget. She sits on the subway next to you, which means you were both in New York and did not tell me. Once, I might have pretended not to care, but I am older. I am sure you know the picture. You are both on the overground part of the F train and the sun is setting, and you can see the sky orange like a fever. In her lap lies a collection of John Donne’s poems, and you have fallen asleep on her shoulder. Her lips are softly parted, as if she is saying something to the photographer that might be a joke, but she has not yet decided. How brilliantly she exceeds us both: lips flushed with the sun or the heat of anticipatory laughter, her feet dusted with sand.

Four weeks later, I learn that you have proposed.

I read about your girlfriend’s book deal on Publisher’s Marketplace one year after we became best friends. It is a historical piece about a woman’s magazine at the turn of the century, tackling important questions about labor politics and gender. It is supposed to be the ‘book of the summer.’ It is supposed to be ‘sharply observed.’ It is supposed to ‘reveal an expansive interior world.’

“Why didn’t you tell me about your novel?” I write on the back of a napkin. “Sounds so cool! We could be peer review buddies! Can I read it?? So excited for you!”

I shove it into the portal. Then I sit in my chair and I wait, like in the old days. Like the time your girlfriend and I stayed up all night asking each other the important questions. Back when the grass inside the portal was lush, and it brushed against her ankles, and the sheep trailed behind her legs as she came to me. How I told her: Love, I think, is about wanting someone’s answers to your most important questions. And she said: What is your most important question? And I said, finally: Do you think about me when I’m not there? Your girlfriend wanted to know if this was really my most important question, and I said, right now it is.

Of course, I think about you, your girlfriend said. Do you think about me? And I said: Every day. We were sitting on the fire escape, and she pressed her head into my shoulder.

“What do you think about me?” she said, and it began to rain. She wore a light yellow dress, and the raindrops left dark splotches that made the fabric cling to her skin. She didn’t look at me, only off towards the dark web of the city. It was a slick night, varnished like an oil painting, the air thick and cool.

“Different things. You know.”

“I do,” she said. And she gave me a long look with a sad smile. It was almost the same look you gave me at the end, standing in front of your car at the airport with the honeyed smell of gasoline. You looked at me like you loved me. For a moment, I thought things could be okay. Then I realized you were only looking at me like that because you were saying goodbye.

Four weeks after I send the napkin letter, I lie on the couch and watch the final Valais Blacknose sheep nap in the dirt. It is the middle of the afternoon and my blinds are drawn. The death rattle of my air conditioner fills the room, the lukewarm air tickling the yellowed leaves of my peace lily, the pleather couch sticking to the back of my thighs. The possum watches me from his cage, refusing to eat the cookies I burned at the pet bakery. I have almost fallen asleep when I hear a noise from the portal, and I see the sheep has risen. Her eyes are indistinguishable from her face, so if she is looking at me, I cannot tell. Then she walks off, as if having briefly fallen asleep on a long journey somewhere else.

Nina Potischman is a writer from Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a Marshall Scholarship. She is working on her debut novel.

@ibs.girlboss