She Wasn't Real — But She Saved My Life

I was eight years old the first time I saw her.

She was sitting on the swings at the park, gently rocking back and forth, her sunflower-yellow ribbons fluttering in the breeze. She turned to me with a grin that felt like sunlight and said, “I’ve been waiting.”

Her name was Lila.

She wasn’t like the other kids. She didn’t make fun of my mismatched socks or the way I always carried a book around. She never called me weird for being quiet. She listened. She laughed at my jokes. She knew when to talk and when to just sit beside me in silence. Most of all, she stayed — and for a kid like me, that meant everything.

You see, I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t the sporty kid, or the funny one. I was the boy who sat alone during lunch. The one who stared out the window in class, hoping for something — someone — to make the loneliness stop.

My home didn’t help. My parents were like two people stuck in the same house, waiting for the other to leave first. They didn’t fight out loud, not usually. They fought in silence — in the cold stares across the dinner table, the slammed doors, the sighs that lingered in the hallway. My father believed in discipline more than love. My mother floated through her days like a shadow. I often felt like I didn’t exist to either of them.

But Lila saw me.

She’d meet me every day — in the park, in my room, sometimes even in my dreams. We played games only we understood. We built forts out of old blankets and imagined they were castles. She told me stories, wild and magical, about forests with glowing animals and skies that sang lullabies. When I cried, she didn’t ask why — she just sat close and let me be small.

No one else could see her.

At first, I didn’t care. She was mine. My secret. My escape. But as I got older, people noticed. Teachers grew concerned. My classmates teased me. My parents, embarrassed and confused, decided something was “wrong” with me. They sent me to a counselor. I didn’t say much. How could I explain that the best thing in my life wasn’t real?

When I turned thirteen, Lila started to change. She still smiled, but it felt... sadder. She held my hand tighter. She whispered things like, “You’re stronger than you think,” and “You don’t need me forever.” I didn’t understand then, but I would soon.

One cold morning, I went to the park. She wasn’t there.

I waited. Hours passed. Nothing.

That night, I called out for her in my room, my voice breaking with fear. Still nothing. She was gone.

I felt like a piece of me had died. The world became heavy, colorless. I stopped talking to people. I stopped caring. I became a shadow of the boy I had been — the one Lila had loved.

But slowly — painfully — something inside me began to shift.

I started journaling. First, just letters to Lila. Then, pages filled with thoughts I’d never dared speak out loud. I wrote about how lonely I was, how angry, how lost. And I started to realize something: Lila had never really existed. Not in the way I wanted her to.

She was never flesh and blood. No one else saw her because she came from inside me.

Lila was the friend I created to survive. She was love in the absence of it. She was joy in a joyless home. She was my resilience, given a face and a laugh and yellow ribbons.

At first, that truth shattered me.

But over time, it healed me.

Because if I had created Lila — if I had imagined something so kind, so brave, so full of light — then maybe that light was already mine. Maybe I wasn’t empty or broken. Maybe I had been whole all along. I just hadn’t known it.

Years later, in my early twenties, I finally sat across from a therapist who didn’t look at me like I was strange. I told her about Lila. Every detail. She listened carefully and then said, “Sometimes, the mind gives us what the world doesn’t. And that’s not madness. That’s survival.”

I cried. Not because I missed Lila — though I did — but because someone finally understood.

I haven’t seen Lila since that day at the park. But she’s still with me — in my strength, in my compassion, in the quiet voice that tells me to keep going when everything feels too much.

She wasn’t real.

But she saved my life.

And for that, I’ll love her forever.