The Boy Who Wasn't There

I hadn’t been home in twelve years. Not really. Not the kind of home that smells like old wood and lemon soap, with drawers that jam halfway and a back door that groans like a dying animal. But here I was, back in my parents’ house — the house I grew up in — standing in the silence of the foyer, key still trembling in my hand.

They were gone now. Both. Within six months of each other, as if one had held out only to make sure the other wouldn’t be alone too long. I’d delayed the sorting, the boxing, the inevitable selling. But life — or what I called life — had run out of distractions. It was time to open old doors.

The silence inside wasn’t peaceful. It was heavy. Dust clung to the corners like cobwebbed memories. The air was stale, still perfumed faintly by something floral my mother used to love. I walked through the house like a stranger, like a ghost myself. Every room was a mirror to time passed.

I didn’t find him right away.

I found dust. Photo albums. Unpaid bills, dried-up pens. A drawer of recipes I remembered by smell more than taste. I found my old books — The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit, spines cracked and annotated in childish scrawl. I found a cassette player with a tape still inside — Counting Crows, August and Everything After. I laughed. I almost cried.

Then I found the box.

It was in the attic, under a pile of yellowing bedsheets and brittle Christmas lights. Tin, rusted, dented. A dragon sticker half-peeled from the lid. I recognized it immediately: a treasure chest, or at least it had been once. We used to bury it in the woods. I lifted the lid, and the smell of dry paper and old crayons hit me like a breath from another life.

Inside: drawings. Stick figures with swords, castles, rockets. "S. & M. Adventures" was scribbled across the top in bold crayon. Some pages were torn. Some water-stained. But the names were clear.

S. & M.

Simon and Me.

Simon.

I blinked. A name folded in dust. A name I hadn’t spoken in decades. Not since…

Not since the forgetting began.

No one else ever remembered Simon.

Not my sister, who remembered everything down to what cereal I liked in 1994.

Not the neighbors, not the teachers.

I asked them, once, years ago — offhand, like it was a trivia question. “Remember Simon? That boy I used to hang out with all summer? Lived across the woods, I think.”

Blank stares.

“There weren’t any other houses past the woods,” my sister had said. “Just the creek. And that broken fence. You used to play alone a lot.”

But I hadn’t been alone.

Simon had a lisp and a laugh like a sneeze. He made up stories about moon dogs and invisible pirates. He hated shoes. He always carried a rock in his pocket, “for balance,” he said. He believed the sky was a dome, and we were all fish in a bowl, being watched. He made the world enormous.

He was the first person I ever told about the yelling. How Dad’s voice could rattle windows, how Mom would disappear into silence for days. Simon said we could run away. Said there were places beyond the town where the sun never set, and you could eat fruit right from the trees, and no one ever shouted.

I believed him.

He was my first friend. My only friend, maybe.

The memories came like waves, too fast to process. Sitting on the roof of the shed, legs dangling. Trading marbles in secret. Playing "Star Knights" in the woods until we were so scratched up Mom made me wear long sleeves in summer. Once, we built a raft and tried to cross the creek. We sank in two minutes. We laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe.

He said goodbye the summer before middle school. I think that’s the last thing I remember clearly. We were under the willow tree by the fence. He said he had to leave. His family was moving. Or maybe he was going to the moon. Or maybe I dreamed it.

Then — nothing.

No address. No number. No farewell picture.

Just blank.

And no one else remembered him.

There was no Simon in class photos. No Simon in our yearbooks. Not even a Simon in the town census records I once searched at 2 a.m. during a bout of insomnia. The house he lived in? Gone. Or maybe never there.

I started to wonder if I made him up. The way lonely children make gods and monsters.

But the box didn’t lie.

His handwriting was there, next to mine — shakier, rounder. There were notes. A birthday card with "You are the bravest person I know" in big blue letters. A crumpled paper star. A rock, polished smooth, labeled “Simon’s Stone.”

I turned it over and over in my palm.

Was it grief I felt?

Or memory collapsing on itself?

I sat down on the attic floor and let the light shift across the ceiling. Dust danced like lost time.

There’s a kind of haunting that doesn’t come with footsteps or flickering lights. It’s the haunting of a presence so vivid that the absence grows teeth.

Simon was that for me.

Even if he wasn’t “real” — whatever that means — he was there. When I needed him. He stood beside me when no one else had. He shaped the way I listened, the way I observed. He taught me that imagination wasn’t an escape, but a way through.

He was the reason I became a writer. Because I wanted to find him again. Or maybe recreate him. Or maybe thank him.

And now I would write him down.

All of him.

The way he whistled through his teeth when he thought. The way he touched trees before leaving the forest — “to say goodbye,” he said. The way he made me believe in things not seen.

He might not be in the photographs or the records.

But he is in me.

And that’s real enough.