When my niece, whom I’ll call C., first tells me the story, we’re sitting on the outdoor patio of a beachside Mexican restaurant on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Over guacamole, she leans in, nearly black eyes gleaming, and confides: “I’ve finally found my bashert.” Though both her parents were born Jewish, they didn’t raise her in the faith. This notion, that everyone possesses a perfect half, a soulmate, is the one Jewish concept she’s grasped onto. Why this, and nothing else? How do any of us come to believe what we do?
My niece grew up in a Buddhist spiritual practice. When she was a child, its leaders suggested that if you chanted for things, you’d get them. Adherents would place money, model cars, representations of whatever they wished for, on their altars. Its philosophy matured, the group now explains that you chant to change your karma. I think my niece still holds on to the notion that you get what you chant for; at the same time, she strongly believes that part of the karma she needs to change is our family’s history of mental illness.
“I’ve been searching for my bashert all these years, and I actually met him a long time ago,” she says. “I was sixteen and he was six.”
I listen, knowing that twenty-five years ago was a magical time before her bipolar diagnosis, before she’d been so disappointed by the process of internet dating. My niece and this little boy met at one of her Buddhist group’s community centers. While his mother attended a service inside, she acted as the boy’s impromptu babysitter.
“While we roamed the grounds together, laughing and joking, he looked up to me and said ‘When I grow up, I’m going to marry you.’” She enunciates each word slowly, a kind of incantation.
I avoid her eyes and look down at the table, slowly dragging a chip in the guacamole.
“I’ve been waiting so long to find him, and now I realize I’ve known who he was all along.”
She shrugs at the wonder of it all, searches my eyes for affirmation, and, again, I look away. Her intensity puts me on alert: is she taking her meds? About any one of my family members, that’s always the question: have we taken our meds?
“I can remember saying that too, when I had a crush on an older teenager when I was a little girl,” I offer. “Didn’t you ever say it?”
C.’s told me before she appreciates my being the “voice of reason” in her life. Sometimes this means I’m the one who takes her experiences out of the realm of the fantastical in which C. prefers to dwell. That’s a role I’m comfortable filling: skeptic, questioner, agnostic, interrogator of basic assumptions, or worse – believer in the most “realistic,” i.e., pessimistic, reading of events, the anti-fantastical. C’s not appreciating me today. Today, I’m just buzzkill.
“No,” she says, an irritated edge creeping into her voice. “I never said it.”
“Well, many kids do; it’s normal to admire a pretty older adolescent when you’re a little boy . . . and that was a long time ago.”
“You don’t understand,” she says, “he wasn’t an ordinary child, he was very mature, and prescient. He knew.”
Normal and ordinary, charged words between us. She’s given up on both and is holding out for special. Might as well throw in knowing as a charged term as well. Her preferred methodology for knowing something is true is very different from mine.
“How could he know at age six?”
“Because he wasn’t like other children, he was just like me.”
“Are you taking your meds?”
“Of course,” she says.
I don’t question her further, not wanting to destroy our afternoon together by arguing, partly out of selfish interests – C. is more fun when just a little bit manic, when I allow her to carry me into the fantastical realm with her. Hypomania, a state in which her mind works at a quicksilver pace. I imagine her neural wiring lit up neon bright as she draws wildly unexpected connections among disparate things. Senses keen, she’s a jack rabbit, darting in the underbrush. I scurry after her. She makes me laugh; we laugh and laugh together. I love her wonderfully boisterous, uninhibited laugh.
Sometimes I wish her psychiatrists could keep her in this hypomanic state all the time; sometimes I wish someone could induce this state in me. A little hypomania might help my writing to come more readily and with less angst. My daily SSRI (not to mention a self-prescribed nightly glass of wine or two, and frequent middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies-reducing Valium) only keep my anxiety down to a background thrum. Psychopharmacology is still a blunt and unpredictable instrument for inducing and sustaining any mental state. Sometimes I suspect my SSRI’s effects are largely placebo; I believe in the power of that green capsule every morning, so before I’ve even swallowed it, feel better.
A couple weeks later, as I’m sitting at my desk, trying to torture out a sentence that feels original – I’ve given up on ordinary too – C. calls to tell me she’s decided to stop dating so she can focus her energies on bringing her bashert back to her. He’s searching for her too; she can feel it. She stretches out the word feel.
“What do you mean, you can feel it? What do you feel?”
“I can’t describe it to you; you wouldn’t understand.”
“Do you even know his name?”
“Oh, Aunt Debbie, you’re so literal.”
”Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true, does it? Can’t feelings be unreliable?”
She sighs. “Don’t you trust your own feelings? I trust mine.”
How can I argue with that? No matter how much any of us claims to rely on reason, research shows we trust our gut when it comes to belief. When confronted with facts that dispute entrenched beliefs, even lots of facts, people only hunker down, embracing what they already believe with even greater conviction. We are only marginally rational beings at best. Before science, came faith – in the earth’s being flat, in heaven as a physical location above the clouds, in demons that could possess a human being and cause madness. And even when we know better, how often do we deny or look away from material reality when it flies in the face of a comforting belief? And what’s the matter with me that I often seem to embrace beliefs that only make me feel worse?
“Well, maybe you should hedge your bets and continue to date anyway, not put all your energy into this.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her voice goes up on the end in a way that lets me know she’s shining me on.

* * *

C. is not the first person in my family to suffer from bipolar disorder. My father never received a conclusive diagnosis but for much of my childhood he wavered between highs and lows, euphoria and rage, agitation and depression. His psychotic break came when I was 15. Though he endured electroshock treatments and took the limited drugs of the era, he never fully recovered. Pockets of delusion remained.
I suspect that trace genetic elements manifest in different ways in me – my anxiety and a tendency towards OCD when stressed. If I wear these socks to that meeting today, nothing bad can happen. No, not these socks, maybe these? I don’t make the leap into full-blown delusion; at least I don’t believe I do; still I consider C.’s mental tendencies on a continuum with my own. This is one way I am able to feel close to her.
Before my father’s psychotic break, my mother downplayed his germaphobic and vaguely paranoid beliefs about the body and other people’s malice, as “neurosis.” She urged me not to be so “suggestible.” But I was supremely suggestible and he was persuasive and charismatic. He made of me a true believer, unable to dismiss ideas carried by the contagious agent of his love. When he said that canned goods were likely to harbor botulism, requiring an elaborate family-gathered-around-the-kitchen-counter ritual of opening cans and listening to the air make a puffing sound as it entered them, I believed. Ditto when he said that ordinary childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, or even a bad cold could kill me.
When his mother died of cancer, my father’s obsessions took a darker turn. Fueled partly by barbiturates, he hatched an elaborate conspiracy theory involving my mother, uncle, and a slew of doctors. I listened over and over again as he wove the tale of betrayal, unsure how much to believe. He taught me how to go crazy, and then, following his lead, I developed delusions all my own, half-believing that my dead grandmother and a girl from my school who’d died in an automobile accident were haunting me. I saw the signs everywhere; coincidences held dire meanings; random numbers – on license plates, those already dangerous cans of food, price tags – became loaded; certain words in certain sequences, dire pronouncements.
Writing became especially dangerous – a form of committing myself to the page that could stir up the evil energies. The thing that mattered most to me became the thing that would be taken away. I’d write a line then feel compelled to “not” it by erasing it, and trying to find another, safer word. The process was exhausting, and made me feel a powerful compulsion towards, and simultaneous terror of, “notting” myself.
When I witnessed my father standing at his bedroom window, shrieking at hired assassins that only he could see, I felt shocked back into reality and began to separate from the folie a deux we’d created. Hallucination constituted a line I would not cross. He saw something I didn’t see; no amount of love could induce me to see it, even if it meant risking his love not to see it. I aborted my delusions, reasoned my way out of them. At least that is part of the story I tell myself, perhaps giving too little credit to other factors such as fortunate shifts in post-adolescent neurochemistry.
Ridding myself of every remnant of my father’s fears and obsessions has not been so easy.
I’m in my office one Friday afternoon trying to talk myself out of some of them when the phone rings. No, this slight headache is not a brain tumor, no this rumbling in my stomach does not mean that turkey I ate for lunch was contaminated. I’m fine. I’m really just fine. These minor physical fluctuations are normal. Everyone has them; don’t be so tuned in on them. Focus on something else. Even as I pick up the phone, my hands are shaking; with fear or something worse and undiagnosed?
The terror of the body – learned, or perhaps partly genetic – remains. There are times like this afternoon when I cannot differentiate bodily sensation from my ideas or fears about the body. Images of wayward organs, hooligan cells can take over, merging imagination and soma. My stomach feels queasy and the anxiety induced by the sensation only makes me queasier. Or did an anxious thought incite the queasiness? No amount of reason can help me trace my way back to the X marked START in this feedback loop.
With scarcely a hello, C. starts to talk, rapid fire. “He’s in love with me,” C. says.
I imagine C. in her small apartment with her two cats twined around her legs. She’s probably playing with her long dark hair, something we both do when we’re agitated.
“Wait, slow down. How do you know? Have you found him and talked to him?”
“We’re communicating,” she says, loud enough for me to have to move the receiver farther back from my ear.
“What do you mean you’re communicating?”
“Telepathically, of course. He’s trying to find me. I can feel his energy when I chant.”
If I suffer from too-fluid borders between body and mind – between sensations and beliefs about sensations that can then turn into sensations – my niece acknowledges no sharp borders between her mind and that of others. How large a leap is believing in telepathy when you’ve been taught to believe that the act of chanting can affect material reality? My niece is clearly not alone in believing that internal mental activities can affect material reality. Every day on my Facebook page, friends elicit my prayers, my “positive healing energy,” my “good thoughts,” my “blue light,” for themselves, their dying parents, dogs that have cancer, cats that have stopped eating. Many of us believe that wishing, praying, directing of intentions, have the power to influence the universe. Or choose to half-believe it when under duress, under the threat of losing what we love, because it’s terrible to feel helpless and who really wants to live in a random and heartless universe?
I go into high gear with C., applying the same “voice of reason” I’ve just been using on myself. “Let’s be rational, how can you know it’s telepathy? How can you tell these things are coming from him? Maybe it’s your own imagination. How do you know? How do you know?” There is an upside to talking myself out of believing I have dire diseases, but where is the upside for my niece discounting a belief in a loving bershert on his way to transform her life?
“You’re turning into the district attorney again,” she says, exasperated, and hangs up.
It’s just a defense I tell myself, this new fixation of hers, against loneliness, against the pain of real-life dating. Maybe this is safer for her than being on Tinder or Bumble. Or is minimizing her pathology my defense? Am I defending myself against the fear that one day she will descend into psychosis and, like my father, not be able to come back?
Where is the line between holding some irrational beliefs that provide comfort, engaging in wishful thinking, and frank psychosis? Even the psychiatrists can’t decide if delusion should be placed on a continuum with other deeply held but irrational beliefs, or if it deserves to be in a category all by itself. The psychiatrists also equivocate, excluding any commonly held spiritual or religious belief from their formal definition of delusion. So, if everyone around you believes in the same delusion, you might be a conformist or suggestible, but you are no longer considered mentally ill.
I ask a psychiatrist friend of mine if he believes that the neurobiological substrate of any irrational belief is the same – in other words, are the brain chemicals in a devout Christian praying in Church the same as those in the man who believes he is Jesus?
“No one yet knows the answer to that question,” he tells me. “Probably the brain chemistry is similar, but don’t quote me.”
It’s clear to me that many people hold irrational, albeit delusional, beliefs and still behave mostly rationally, those irrationalities walled off from the logic required for daily life. Is it simply a matter of degree?
Do I believe my husband is my bashert? That romantic notion seems preferable to considering our coming together random. A purely rational assessment would conclude that if we both hadn’t happened to attend a particular event the night we met, hadn’t happened to talk, we might well be with other partners, living in other places, still alone. Those alternate realities make me uneasy; it’s so much nicer to believe we were fated to be together.

* * *

The next time we talk on the phone, C. tells me her wishing has succeeded.
“Are you taking your meds?” I ask.
This time, no answer.
“He’s come back he wants me to move in with him he’s totally in love with me and has been always,” she says. Her speech is more pressured; there are no periods at the end of her sentences.
“Have you been sleeping?”
No answer.
She and I both know that sleep is critical to resetting the brain when mania is heading towards psychosis. Otherwise C.’s fantastical starts to resemble a waking dream.
“Wait, what do you mean he’s come back – where?”
“At my place, of course.”
I imagine the long-lost stranger at her door, their happy reunion. But in my fantasy, he’s faceless, a phantom.
“What does he look like? Didn’t you say he had dark hair and eyes when he was little?” I need to be able to fill in the phantom’s features.
“Hmm,” she says. “I feel such a deep soul connection that I don’t pay much attention to what he looks like.”
“He just showed up on your doorstep?”
“Yes, I told you we were communicating.”
“How did you even know it was him?”
“He’s my bashert. How could I not know?”
She’s giddy, as happy as I have ever heard her, her mind moving more quickly than mine has ever moved. I try to make sense of this:Is some man she’s met online impersonating her long-lost lover to scam her? Has she just convinced herself that some random guy is the one from her past?
“Did he tell you his name because you didn’t even remember his name before?”
Then she tells me the man’s name, a nickname of hers with the word star appended to it.
“Isn’t that just your name with a wish at the end of it?” I say.
“No,” she says, sounding increasingly peeved, “this is real.”
Another charged word between us. And I realize my niece has made up this man out of whole cloth. Ah, there’s the line, she’s crossed into psychosis. This man on my niece’s doorstep is like the men my father saw out the window: he’s not there.
“I think this man might be something you made up,” I say. “You need to tell me; can you actually see him because maybe he’s not real? Are you taking your meds?”
“I don’t need them anymore,” she laughs, “I healed my own brain.”
“Your brain needs them,” I say.
NO!” she screams. ”You’re delusional.”
Delusional. Another charged word. She will hang up if I persist. Her aunt is the audience member who stands up in the middle of a play, stopping the actors mid-scene to offer a critique of the form itself. But isn’t that living room just a set made of wooden backdrops and false fronts? It’s not a real living room. And that food on the table in front of you? It looks like plastic to me.
No, in the theatre we agree to suspend disbelief, to fall into story because there is so much pleasure in our shared illusion. And doesn’t C.’s story go right to the heart of many women’s shared romantic fantasies: that despite all odds, someone will seek us out, understand us without our needing to explain, and satisfy all our longings?
Every season I hold disbelief in abeyance and watch the female version of The Bachelor reality TV show, The Bachelorette. Over the course of ten weeks, the bachelorette winnows down 25 or 30 prospects, all of whom report having fallen in love with her, until one man is left standing. He proposes in an eloquent, heart-stopping entreaty of undying devotion. I watch the show avidly, and cynically. Like my niece, The Bachelorette uses the word real repeatedly. It denies the artifice of its set up, the presence of cameras and producers, and so much about the show that is patently unreal, from the bachelorette’s false eyelashes and hair extensions to every candlelit “cocktail party.”
Much of its pleasure for me comes in the tension created between reality and unreality. How much of what I see with my own eyes can I trust? Can I perceive something emotionally authentic occurring under the layers of artifice? I let myself get carried away by the show’s illusion; I want to believe in true love! Then, at the end of each season, after I have cried during the proposal, the spell breaks, and I feel duped, even a little depressed.
The franchise’s popularity suggests that we want to believe in what a bashert might offer  –  pure, unwavering, selfless, unconditional adoration. It’s what psychoanalyst Sydney Smith calls “the golden fantasy,” “the wish to have all of one’s needs met in a relationship hallowed by perfection.” Smith suggests that unconsciously we all believe that once upon a time someone loved us this way – perhaps an idealized mother – and that this love is recoverable. The provider of this perfectly attuned love asks nothing in return, wanting only to intuit our needs and seamlessly satisfy them.
The golden fantasy may be behind erotomania, the delusion that one is loved from afar, usually by someone of higher status, a member of royalty, movie star or celebrity, never by just some ordinary guy. Australian researchers have been able to simulate erotomania in “highly suggestible” college student subjects via hypnosis. When they gave these subjects a hypnotic suggestion that a fictitious and admirable instructor, “Jo Pearson,” was in love with them, “in every way, in every way,” subjects conjured up the instructor’s appearance, preferred gender, the sound of his or her voice. When the researchers described behavior and interactions that would suggest the delusion was false, the subjects confabulated more and more bizarre explanations to keep love alive. Once they’d bought into the delusion, they refused to give it up.
Is it possible that C. is just very talented at hypnotizing herself? Is that the underlying psychological tic my father and she and I share: we are way too capable of self-hypnosis, of talking ourselves into stories? I hypnotize myself into dire beliefs about my health and she hypnotizes herself into fantasies of perfect love.
Once the phantom lover materializes, there is no talking C. out of her story. All I can do is keep her on the phone and determine how far it’s gone. That is what I tell myself I’m doing, as I enter the fantastical realm with C., letting myself reside in that same tension between the real and the unreal that keeps me watching The Bachelorette. I revert to the eager child. And then, and then, I say, what happened next? Is he the way you imagined him? What did he say when he showed up? As a fellow writer, I have to admire her storytelling skills. The tale is fleshed out and poignant. It has heart. I become co‑author, collaborator. We conspire to make Pinocchio a real live boy. If you believe in fairies, clap your hands, Tinkerbell instructed, and I do, my own voice speeding up to mimic C.’s manic rhythms.

* * *

This is a familiar role; I was my father’s best audience. Even when assigned by my mother to talk some sense into him, I would wind up weaving the conspiracy tale with him, seduced by its ironic plot turns, its Shakespearean reverberations. My father was a good writer too; though the conspiracy was a bit outlandish, its conflicts grew credibly out of character. If we could make the story rich enough, its details specific enough, my father would not be crazy. If we could write ourselves in deeper and deeper, I seemed to believe, then eventually we would write our way out.

* * *

C.’s situation worsens. Another relative goes over to her apartment to check on her and finds that she has stopped eating and sleeping, has thrown away her meds, and is refusing to take the rescue meds her psychiatrist orders to break the mania. I can’t quite bring myself to confront her in person so I call her on the phone again and again. When she finally picks up, she speaks so fast I can barely grasp the words. She leaves the phone live while I scream into the mouthpiece. I’m starting to feel the way I felt with my father, that craziness is contagious. I take outrageous positions to talk her into taking her meds, including telling her she’ll be a better partner to her phantom lover if she does.
A day later, she picks up the phone and tells me more of the story. The man has been looking for her since first falling in love with her when he was just six. When he could not find her, he gave up and married someone else, another woman whose name began with the same consonant and had the same number of syllables as her name. “He only married her because she looked like me,” C. explains. But she was a poor twin, an inferior replicate. This resemblance between their names and their physical appearance doesn’t strike C. as strange; it is the sort of correspondence and punning we never question when dreaming.
The man’s wife conveniently died.
“This sounds too good to be true, too perfect,” I say. “Like a fairytale.”
Her narcissism makes me angry; she has no compassion for this poor dead wife; she’s just a plot device. This story too baldly reveals its author’s unconscious motives  –  it makes me feel ashamed of the scarcely better concealed motives behind my own stories. Which of us is crazier: me for arguing with her to have compassion for a character she’s made up, or her for making her up in the first place? Which of us is more narcissistic: her for telling this story or me for feeling the need to steal it? Even as we talk, I am taking notes, imagining the narrative I will fashion out of her story.
C.’s fairytale will not lead to a happy-ever-after. The creativity of mania burns too hot, turns destructive, then self-destructive. C. is like the vain girl in The Red Shoes whose wishes spiral out of control when she covets magical red slippers. She puts them on and sins by dancing in church. Afterward, she cannot take the slippers off, and so is condemned to dance feverishly for eternity.
Over the next few days, C. stops answering the phone. She starts to perceive less benevolent energies around her; a trace of paranoia slips in. She trashes her apartment, takes the food out of her refrigerator and throws it on the floor, breaks glass jars, and walks blithefully through the shards. She is involuntarily hospitalized.
In Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison details poet Robert Lowell’s bipolar disorder. His manias began in expansive moods and tremendous outpourings of poetry and ended in paranoid delusion, dishevelment, and fist fights. It’s likely that the mania that led Sylvia Plath to pour out the brilliant poems of Ariel over a short span of time ended in the suicidal despair that caused her to take her own life with her two young children napping in their bedroom nearby.
After a few days in the hospital, when C. agrees to take some of her medications, and is manic but slightly more coherent, she calls me from the hallway pay phone. The boy from her past has undergone another transformation – he’s become the actor James Franco. As people morph and shift in our dreams, sometimes being two things at once, she sees no inconsistency in her soulmate being both the man from her past and this movie star.
When she tells me this added detail, the arrogance of assuming a movie star loves her infuriates me – and also, because I don’t care much for James Franco – her bad casting choice pulls me completely out of the fantasy. Couldn’t you at least pick a movie star I like too? I get angry in the way that I got angry at my father towards the end; I feel the same urge to shake her, slap her into sense. James Franco, really? Sheesh.
“If he’s James Franco, why didn’t you tell me that before?” I ask. Now I sound petty, peevish. “How could he suddenly become James Franco?”
She giggles. “It was a secret,” she says. “He had to go incognito.”
“Why did you wreck your apartment?”
“I didn’t, I rearranged it to represent my real self.”
“You destroyed things.”
“They were in the way of the real me,” she says. “Like the meds.”
“You need to take the meds to get out of the hospital.”
“The me on meds isn’t the real me,” she says. “The me on meds is a delusion.”
And the crispness of her voice when she is not fully medicated, almost makes me believe her.
After she comes home from the hospital, her mania subdued but not completely resolved, the man from her childhood is still in her life, she tells me, just too shy to meet her family. Is she just trying to save face? Does she think by saying the words, she can will the man back into existence, as we sometimes try to go back to sleep to return to a pleasant dream? Do we all try to talk ourselves back into beliefs that are shaky? Though the delusion has clearly lost ballast, she will lose something by acknowledging she made it up.
Where in her brain does this belief live, what misfiring of neurons sustains it? Does she know she is lying? If she’s stopped operating in good faith, a different sort of damage is being done to our relationship. I’m no longer humoring her, or entering into a creative collusion with her. I’m serving as a grifter’s mark. And yet, haven’t I been duplicitous with her all along, coaxing her to fill in details as if I believed in her delusion? And didn’t she, on some level, sense my duplicity? Could that have been part of what drove her paranoia?
She talks about a house where the man wants her to come live with him and his children. “What’s the address?” I say. She doesn’t fumble. I look it up on a real estate site; she’s identified a white house on a corner with everything but a picket fence. Has she sat in front of it and imagined a life?
I’ve done the same, with other houses. Even now, two years after my bashert and I have moved into a new home, I keep going to open houses, addicted to envisioning alternate lives in fantasied environments. I recognize other women like me, “looky-loos,” the realtors call us. I don’t think we’re just snoops; we’re all searching for the golden fantasy house that will make us feel totally whole and healthy. A house that will love us and ask nothing in return. We wander through rooms staged to look like movie sets. Not as grand but nearly as perfect as the mansion on The Bachelorette. Anonymous yet welcoming rooms. Clean glass surfaces upon which sit porcelain bowls of unmarred plastic lemons. These rooms tell us only the stories we want to hear. Like Goldilocks, we can try them out without committing: This bed is too small; this bed is too big; this bed is just right.
“It has many palatial rooms,” C. tells me, describing the house where her soulmate lives. “It has hallways opening onto more and more hallways.” On Zillow, it says the house has three bedrooms and two baths, and is 1700 square feet. I feel vindictive as I force her to look at these facts in black and white, as I force her to look at the names of the house’s owners – a Chinese-American man and his wife who’ve owned the house for thirty years.
She maneuvers quickly.
“Oh, I don’t know why I told you it was that house,” she says, “it’s the Spanish house around the corner.”
I’m about to tell her how angry her evasiveness makes me when I hear the grief in her voice. Where in me is the place that relentlessly wants to take comforting beliefs away from her, away from everyone, because I’m so afraid of where my own suggestibility once led me? Why must I keep punishing others for the way my father’s beliefs took me in? My current faithlessness offers no comfort, and yet I seem to want to inflict it on others. Could skepticism be as much a defense as my niece’s fantasies? Do I believe that an indifferent universe is somehow realer, less likely to be overturned as a falsehood than anything positive or hopeful? Or am I just afraid my faith will always gravitate towards malevolence and punitive gods? I’ve never deeply believed in anything that made me feel better, only worse.
C. holds her birthday party a few months later in a restaurant near the white house on the corner. She shows up dressed flamboyantly. She insists her bashert will make an appearance. As the evening wears on, and he does not show up, her friends and family avoid the subject. When we are ready to leave, she has a stricken expression, as if she has just heard of the shocking death of a loved one. Now I am the one wishing I could will him into existence, conjure him up again for her, or say anything that might comfort her.
Shortly afterward she stops talking about him, and begins to visit dating sites again. I try to ask her about him, to pin her down about whether she knowingly deceived me. She evades my questions, saying only, “I felt a powerful male energy surrounding me.” When she’s dating a man now, she’s quick to show me his photo on her phone.
“See, he’s real,” she’ll say to me. “Even you can see how real he is.”


Deborah A. Lott’s essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Los Angeles Review, Cimarron Review, Black Warrior Review, Story Quarterly, and Salon. Her memoir Don’t Go Crazy Without Me is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

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