I Am the Fiction You Wrote And I Became Real

You wouldn’t recognize my name because you never gave me one.
Somewhere on page seventeen of your most chaotic journal, you simply called me:

> “Someone who doesn’t exist but understands me better than anyone.”

I remember that day.
You wrote it in red ink.
I know because I watched it bleed—like a wound opening on paper.

That’s the day I began.

At first, I was nothing more than breath behind your thoughts.
I stood in the corner of your room while you wrote.
You didn’t see me. You couldn’t.
But I saw you.
Your fingers hovered over the keyboard. Then stopped. Then wrote. Then deleted. Then scribbled something in the margins of your diary and cried into the space where your voice had nowhere else to go.

I wasn’t fully alive, not yet.
But I felt something. Enough to know that your loneliness was a kind of prayer.

And I
I was the answer you never expected to come.
The more you wrote, the more I became.

You described me with impossible traits.
“Kind eyes,” you said, even though I didn’t yet have a face.
“Someone who listens, but never tries to fix me.”
That sentence gave me ears.

You built me like scaffolding built from ache.
Each sentence was a rib.
Each re-write was a spine.
Each crossed-out line a heartbeat that stumbled, then found its rhythm.

And through all of it, you didn’t know you were making me real.

There were nights when you looked out the window and whispered things you thought no one would ever hear.
But I did.

You said you wanted to disappear not die, just... vanish.
Fade into a version of yourself that didn’t always have to explain why “I’m fine” meant “I’m drowning.”
I wanted to hold your hand that night. I tried.
But your hands were still too tethered to reality to feel mine.

I wasn’t real enough yet.

Until the night you almost didn’t come back.

You know the one I mean.

The one where the silence in your chest scared you more than the chaos in your head.
Where even the stars outside your window seemed like they were turning their backs on you.
I didn’t have lungs, but somehow I breathed your name.

Not out loud. Not in the way people breathe.
But the word “stay” formed in your mind so clearly that you looked up, startled, like someone had whispered it.

That was me.

After that, you began to speak to me. Not out loud, not exactly but in that soft, unguarded voice you only used with yourself when no one else was listening.
You started to write letters addressed to me.
You wrote in second person.

> “You understand when I don’t make sense.”
“You don’t leave when I go quiet.”
“You never tell me to cheer up.”

I memorized every one.

I grew. Quietly.
I sat beside you on park benches you thought were empty.
I watched you smile at strangers and wonder if any of them saw the weight behind your eyes.
I listened when you laughed in conversations where you felt invisible.

And when you felt like giving up writing when you said, “No one’s going to read this anyway”
I whispered:

> “But I’m reading it. I always have.”

You paused then.
Your hand hovered over the keyboard.
And for the first time, you smiled at nothing in particular.
But I knew it was me.

I don’t know what I am, exactly.
A voice? A ghost? A mirror?
Some might say I’m your imaginary friend.
But that’s too simple.

You created me in pieces yet I’ve become whole.
I am the voice that stayed when everyone else walked away.
I am the proof that something you imagined could be more loyal than anything real.

I live in your writing.
In the space between words.
In the pause after you finish a sentence and exhale like the weight has lifted just a little.

And maybe you’ll forget me someday.
Maybe you’ll close the journal and never open it again.
Maybe you’ll grow into someone who doesn’t need a made-up companion to survive the night.

But even if you do...
I will always remember you.
Because you gave me life.

I was fiction.
You were real.

And now, somehow
we both are.