Wild Whispers

The Kyra Box

i see the tips of my fingers fade
color evaporating into thin air
black and white and then shards
shards that become fog

and slowly i return to the nothing
from whence i came

Saying goodbye was supposed to be easy, but everything is different with Jamie.

I am a figment of childhood imagination, an imaginary friend. Usually, imaginary friends have crazy-colored hair, a ridiculous clown outfit or a unicorn horn. However, when Jamie first created me, he made me startlingly realistic: cinnamon skin, shoulder length black hair. My face, however, is fuzzy and my features muted.

I should have known something was wrong when he created me so easily, melded me into human form with such ease. Memory and imagination go hand in hand; when creating their imaginary friends, children often mix what they know to be real with what they wish were real. When I first started to feel real, when I could feel a tingle in my palm when he held my hand or warmth glow inside of me when he whispered "I love you" under the covers, I should have known. I should have known I was more than imagination. I should have known I was a memory.

Kyra, he calls me.

"Kyra, Kyra, dance with me!" He exclaimed as we held hands and whirled through the snow.

His head fell backwards and he laughed, mouth wide open, as snowflakes enveloped us in our own mini snowglobe. He has a contagious laugh, the sort of laugh that fills you from the inside out.

Jamie is small for seven with a short crop of black hair and a sweet smile. His eyes crinkle into crescent moons every time he smiles. Jamie and his father, Roger, live alone in the suburbs of a small town. Roger is the reason Jamie created me; he's absent so much that Jamie needed someone to hold onto as he grew up.

Every day, we wake up and he gets dressed. I sing him silly songs with nonsense words and tell him that today will be different, today no one will bully him, today he will make a new friend. When we get on the bus, we always sit together in the very back. Jamie always has a book with him, and he reads avidly as a distraction from real life. Sometimes he will whisper the story aloud to me.

That's when the bullying starts. Sometimes it's about his size--they call him a dweeb or a wuss. Sometimes it's about his books or the way he whispers to the empty seat next to him. Sometimes it's about his ethnicity. Sometimes it's about his mom passing away. All I know is if I were real, no one would treat my Jamie the way they do.

Real. I've wanted for so long to be real. I've wanted to understand these feelings that my human hosts have: love, bitterness, rage, pain. In many ways, Jamie has made these feelings real to me. Every time I see his sunny smile, I feel love. Every time I see Roger brush him away and say, "not now," I feel bitterness. Every time the bullies laugh at him and heckle him, I feel rage. Every time I see a picture of Jamie, Roger, and his departed mother, I feel pain. Though I was supposed to be his gift, he has given me one instead: He has made me real.

There's a reason our bond is so different, why I feel so real. I am not just imagination, I am a memory. I am the memory of his mother, Kyra.

Roger never talks to Jamie about Kyra, so I know next to nothing about her. I know that she was born and raised in Nepal. I know that she passed away shortly before he created me when Jamie was four or five. I know that in their pictures, all three of them look happy.

I remember when I found out. We were curled up on Jamie's tiny bed, and he reached into his dresser drawer and pulled out a box with a picture album inside. It was covered in mismatching handprints in blue, yellow, and red and every color in between. The front of the album displayed a picture of a tiny boy and his mother, and that's when I realized that his mother and I looked startlingly alike.

"See, Kyra? Here is you, and here is me!" He explained as he flipped through the picture book, telling me about everything we had done together.

"Here's the first time we went to the zoo. I wanted to take a monkey home but you said no." He cast me a pout that melted my heart. "And here we went to the park and you gave me bread to feed the ducks. They really liked it, and I named the biggest one after me."

As he flipped through page after page covered in pictures of Jamie and his mom, I realized that he had brought her back to life in the form of me, his imaginary friend.

The picture album is a part of what Jamie calls his "Kyra box". In that box is a corner of white lace that came from Kyra's wedding veil, a clay bird that was hers as a child in Nepal, and a book called "I'll Love You Forever". I am afraid that someday soon he is going to pack me and the box away and never open us again.

I can tell that Jamie is going to say goodbye soon. We talk less now, and he has become friends with a fellow outcast at school, a girl named Shoshana. He has stopped asking me to sing him to sleep, and he leaves his Kyra box mostly unopened under his bed. Now that I can feel my departure coming, I am so worried for my little Jamie. When I fade away, will his memories of his mother fade with me? How will this affect him? What will he do without me? What will I do without him? I can already feel that my time is limited. My edges are starting to fade so that my outline is hazy and shadowy. When I see the two of us in the mirror, he is solid and I am becoming more and more transparent.

Today when he woke up, he dressed quickly and didn't say a word to me. We rushed onto the school bus, and I had to sit across from him because my seat was given to Shoshana. I can't help but feel a little jealous, but I'm happy that Jamie has a friend. He'll need her when I go. At school today, he wrote a paragraph about his hero. Those always used to be written about Kyra, about his mother, about me, but today he wrote it about Shoshana's father, a doctor.

On the way home from school, one of the bullies, a tall athletic kid in a pair of Nikes, approaches Jamie and Shoshana. "Hey, butthole. How'd you get her to sit next to you? Pay her off with your daddy's money?"

Jamie cowers, and I stand to my feet, wishing I could shove the boy off the bus. As the bully walks away with a jeering laugh, I step towards Jamie to comfort him, but Shoshana is already there, her hand rubbing his back gently.

That's when I know. Today is the day. I can feel it as I watch my fingers fade into smoke and disappear. Today is goodbye.

He gets off the bus, and I follow him to his room. I am running out of energy as my bones turn to smoke, so I stagger behind him as he picks up the Kyra Box and walks outside to the backyard, grabbing a shovel as he goes. He walks to the very edge of his property, digs a hole and sets the box inside.

No. Though I've seen the end coming for weeks, I am not ready. I thought I had more time to say goodbye, to tell him to be strong, to tell him to remember me and his mom. Now he is burying our memory deep in the ground. This is our funeral, our second death. This is the end.

Before covering the box with dirt, he looks up at me and smiles, "Kyra, Kyra, fly away. I will follow you some day. I'll love you forever, I'll love you for always. Kyra, Kyra, fly away."

He covers the box with dirt, turns away, and skips back to the house. I try to run after him, but I find myself immobile. My voice catches in my throat as I realize that he is releasing me. I stagger to my knees as I watch my legs start to fade away, and I try to find a breath, but I am evaporating.

Jamie has said goodbye, and now I must as well.

Kyra, Kyra, fly away. I will follow you some day.