Liam and a Girl's Imaginary Friend

I met a man no more than three years old named Liam. I call him a man because he possesses the understanding I believe adult human beings should possess. But then, not many of us do.

With two hours free of college work and meetings, I sat alone in a small coffeehouse in middle Minnesota, Small-Town, USA—trying to pacify the stress, the ferret gnawing my stomach and lungs. This particular coffee house had come under new management lately, and the décor had transformed in a matter of days. It reminded me of Europe, casual yet deliberate lighting flickering brightly and tangled string lights wrapping around wooden ledges. Each table had a small candle, unlit, stranded in the middle. Classical music whispered in the background. At one of these tables, sipping Earl Grey tea, I hunched over my book of essays, distractedly reading of a life rejecting technology and making notes in the margins, when this little man sprang up and sat across from me. He introduced himself and asked my name.

“I’m Liam. Will you be my friend?” he asked, not as if he needed a friend but as though I needed one.

“Well, of course, I will, Liam,” I replied without comprehending the true meaning of his question, thinking he only wanted someone to entertain him while his mother ran errands. I even chuckled a little at his desire and unashamed self-assurance. We shook hands on our agreement to be friends. Liam then abruptly leapt from the seat across from me.

“I’m gonna go hide.”

“Okay.”

He tumbled behind a wall and hid. I laughed quietly and returned to my reading. In my younger years I would have known to seek him, but my child memory faded not long ago. A couple of short minutes passed. I had just finished reading the line “My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can”[1] when Liam returned with a green balloon in his mouth. I could sense his mischievous grin lay behind the balloon. The green balloon shot past my ear. Liam laughed a boisterous laugh. I laughed, too.

Liam found the balloon, crawled underneath my table, and scrambled up onto the seat across from me again. I surrendered to Liam’s persistent exuberance. Liam devised a game we both could play with the balloon. I held up my hand and if Liam hit it I awarded him a point. Eventually we started devising odd rules for more points. The number 45 fascinated Liam so he designated most odd rules as 45-pointers. My favorite rule was the 60-point-off-the-head rule where if Liam managed to hit me in the head he received 60 points, the most of any rule. We played that game together for nearly an hour.

Liam’s mother arrived after that hour. She had always been there, in that coffeehouse, but she had been busy doing errands in other rooms. She was the new manager or owner. We shook hands as she introduced herself to me as Deirdre. I said it was nice to meet her. Then she turned her attention to Liam, who sat beneath the table as part of an odd rule where he could receive extra points if I could not see him. Deirdre told him to get out from under the table.

“I’m a bear in a cave, mom,” Liam explained bluntly, as if being under the table were perfectly natural for him. I felt two emotions at once: embarrassment and resentment. My embarrassment came from knowing Liam was acting unacceptably. My resentment came from wanting to crawl under the table, too. Perhaps the emotions and their reasons mixed a little.

“Remember the agreement we had about listening?” Deirdre replied. Liam apparently remembered because he started to emerge from his cave. Deirdre left again to do the last of her errands. Liam crawled back into his cave and shot the balloon at me. Liam’s resolve amazed me. At first I tried to tell him to get off the floor because his mom had asked it of him. He acknowledged me but remained under the table. I surrendered again to his enthusiasm, and we continued our game.

I complain about time. I do not have it. College students complain about time, about its pace and its scarcity. We utilize and worship every second of free time. We assign it slots in our planners and clock the minutes spent doing personal things like watching a movie or going out to the bar. Some go as far as to write what they plan to do with that time, rather than simply remembering it. Others who are not students seem to have less time, even with planners and electronic calendars. Even those who do not schedule time plan something to occupy the mind—television, video games, internet chat rooms. Perhaps we combat boredom with these seemingly infinite distractions. Somehow boredom does not seem dangerous enough to demand a constant bombardment of distractions.

There’s a three-year-old girl in New York with an imaginary friend. She’s like Liam, which makes me like the imaginary friend. This little girl’s friend has no time for her, stuck in meetings and ever-occurring business conventions. Eventually the friend needed a secretary to take the little girl’s calls. She tries to get her imaginary friend to play, but he never has the time. This story is from the New Yorker, from about a year ago. Perhaps this little girl created this friend to suppress her loneliness. Perhaps he’s like every other child’s imaginary friend, except he’s never around. He cannot cure her isolation when he too isolates her. This little girl created her imaginary friend for something very different, something more meaningful.

The father of this girl (the author of the New Yorker article) saw the positive effects this strange imaginary friend had on his daughter: the increased sense of self and the evolved imagination. He even notes that eventually his daughter, instead of explaining the exploits and missed opportunities of this imaginary friend, describes her day and her accomplishments—how she had been too busy to worry about her imaginary friend, though they grabbed lunch together. But does that not make her like her imaginary friend? Does that not mean that she will simply fall into the pattern and have no time for another three-year-old girl? The world seems horrendously backward when a child fills her schedule with imaginary appointments to pacify the loneliness of an imaginary friend too busy for her.

I did not finish my essay until Liam left with his mother. When I had finished my reading and my tea, I thanked the lady behind the counter and told her to have a nice day. I stepped out into the dreary cold, a miserable Minnesota fall day.

I checked my watch. Ten minutes until the bus left, ten minutes to get to my meeting on time. I cupped my hands and breathed hot life into them, as all cold fools do even though the sensation is temporary and of little use against the chill. No one else endured the sleet and gusts of wind. Only one car passed me, lights and wipers on low. And for some reason I noted the lack of animals even though squirrels and birds rarely scamper through town streets. Though almost late, I did not hurry. The little ferret in my chest had quieted. I crossed the nearly empty street, back onto campus. The wind picked up and sleeted hit harder against my face, but I did not put up my hood. Had I covered my head, I would not have seen out of the corner of my eye a small sparrow, with a broken wing. He stood alone in the middle of the road, either waiting for the storm to end or a car to end it for him. In either case, he did not seem to know or care which would occur. I took one step slowly toward him; he did not move. I took another step, and the bird jumped back. We stood staring at each for a while, seven minutes maybe, surrounded by wet dreariness and asphalt. He finally let me pick him up, and I cupped him in my hands. He bit me at first, though not convincingly, as I breathed on him with warm breath. I escorted him to a nearby pine tree, off the road and mostly sheltered against the weather. I’m not usually the type to save small woodland creatures, but I felt his lonely vulnerability as much as if it had been my own. For a moment, we were not lonely.

Being alone and being lonely do not represent the same state of being. How the words alone and lonely came to be related is not exactly a mystery. Alone actually derives from the words all and one. Lonely is the adjective form of lone, which is simply a shortened form of alone. Yet the two words have very little to do with one another besides their linguistic history. They differ distinctly in a couple of ways. Solitude, away from all humanity, on the Irish shores or in the Colorado Mountains rarely necessitates loneliness, and then only when isolation accompanies it. Indeed, solitude can be a solace for many, a reprieve from the chaotic world. Being alone does not create loneliness. And neither is the reverse true. Walk down a crowded street for an hour or perhaps through a mall. Look at the faces. Loneliness exists there. Loneliness does not require being alone. Third, loneliness comes from a feeling of loss, of detachment, of isolation from a loved—being alone does not.

I had reclaimed nature: the physical dirt and real air, the sleet in my hair. The loved ones I had lost or forgotten were earth, flora, and fauna. Liam’s play had reminded me of an old version of myself, a version I thought lost. He redeemed my child memory, a recovery that ended my isolation of nature.

That’s when I realized what Liam had understood and what the little girl tried to show her parents. They knew video games and televisions were only distractions. They knew schedules plans were not an attempt to utilize time but an attempt to stave off loneliness, loneliness created by isolation from nature. I had not gone to the coffeehouse to relieve stress but to forget my isolation. Liam’s and the girl’s loneliness had begun with busy parents who were too tired to fight their own disenchanted disconnection. The three-year-old girl had tried to communicate this to her parents by reaching out to an imaginary friend as Liam had reached out to me. Her attempt failed, and instead she chose the path of the parents, the path of distractions. But she still desired her imaginary friend’s attention. Every night she whimpered quietly his name, asking him to do lunch or to walk to the park with her. Even following the path of distractions, the girl wanted something else. Liam understood that something. He understood that to be distracted is still to be lonely. He felt my lonely vulnerability. He picked me up, cupped me in his hands, and placed me in a pine tree.

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[1] Berry, Wendell. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”