Friendship

Let’s Pretend: A Fable of Friendship.

(For Suzanne Fitzpatrick ).

As usual this may contain a few clichés.      

Friendship.    

Concord, Amity, Compatibility, Sociality, Familiarity, Kindness, Courtesy, Benevolence.

(Acknowledgement to dear Roget, he too is a friend. Where would I be without him?)

It was inevitable really. She had a name but I would never find her on Friends Reunited, however hard I tried. That was sad. Where was she? Had she died? Moved to another place (in time) (or space?).

Let’s Pretend was my Child’s Best Game. I lived it to survive. Saw visions, dreamed my dreams.

But had I not enough of the power of inventiveness, creativeness, originality?        

Originality. Now that’s what she possessed; my Suzanne.  

She was full of it and insight too,

( always there to guide me).

Empathy,

(always there to understand so well).

Moral sensibility,

(always needed by me).

Sympathy,

(always caring for me).

Enthusiasm,

(when I had no hope).    

She was my inspiration. She was beautiful of course, with long red hair and not one teeny curl or wave; a perfect body, tanned and freckle-free.  

(For Suzanne was perfect. It has to be said.).    

She was my ideal (my other half?). Did I conceive her, coin her in my mind? Or was she purely my soul’s creation, a mere figment and a fiction, just an exercise in dreaming, a mere flight of fancy in my brain? An extravaganza? Pure exaggeration?  But as I grew I lost myself in verse and fantasy and took to building castles in the air, with wild, wild dreams and visual fallacy. (Was this too an hallucination?).    

For the land I lived amidst was make-believe. I day-dreamed, cloud-watched, searched the skies (there were never any cuckoos there).    

And all the while:    

Suzy was my divine, my friend and dreamer

and a reader of the runes.

A caster of the stones and my very own Tarot queen.

A myth-maker for the heart and a bringer of True Romance

to my sad, sad life.    

(For she was lively and resourceful and all my hurts and problems blew away). Was she unreal? Illusory in a world where fiction and untruths combine? Was she concocted; fabricated?     

Could she be conjured out of no-where?

What does she re-present?

Is there a website for the non-existent?   Imaginary Friends Reunited, oh what fun.   Back from the Land of Neverness (in Space),

Would we unite again?    

No. I will have to face it, Suzanne is extinct; she’s died, defunct and vanished, is no more, has passed away, moved on, has been promoted and has perished from this Earth.    

Or was she never born, just undiscovered and is she yet to come?

Or self-destructed and all my words unfounded?,

Our bonding had potential but it came to only naught;

she left her trace of Friendship

but it did not stand that age old test

………of Time