She isn't real

My longest relationship has been with Chanterelle. It is likely going on twenty years at this point. She has long blonde hair, worn loose or in a thin scarf. She favors sundresses and flowing skirts, though she isn't averse to torn yet well-fitting jeans as the occasion demands. Her sleepy eyes are blue, though sometimes they are green in the right light. She tends to move in a languid, swimming way, an unconscious grace. Whenever she holds pencils or paintbrushes, they end up held in the corner of her mouth as she focuses on whatever art she is crafting. She is gifted with stringed instruments, guitar and piano--though she is no slouch with the violin. She can sing with a honey sweetness, holding notes that startle listeners that so much force can come from such a slight woman. She has capital-O Opinions about books and always has one around her (though she prefers the sensory attachment of paper).

I haven't seen her much recently. I was reminded of her when remembering that Joseph Fink had used her name in Alice Isn't Dead, which startled me--particularly coupled with his using locations around me. It felt as though he had somehow been snooping into my life, so obscure and precise this felt. So few people know about Chanterelle. I couldn't imagine who would have spilled the beans to Fink.

Chanterelle isn't real, as such. She is an imaginary girlfriend I made up in college when in a relationship that was palpable, but not ideal. Onto this imaginary friend, I could project all the attributes I thought would be more perfect for me. She wasn't some buxom Amazonian. Instead, she had a better than average prettiness. She could be waiting at the next coffeehouse open mic or skimming the spines at the public library. Even as I built up more of her, she was never meant to be some Hollywood creation. She was someone with whom I thought I would get along. Someone with whom, it would not have been out of the realm of possibility that we would fall into a bed-shattering, weekend-obliterating affair, almost despite ourselves. I see the sadness of creating her in the first place, much as she started as a mental game. When I was in bed with the wrong woman for the hundredth night in a row, it helped to imagine that there could be a right woman.

Chanterelle reads my books and stories, liking some and loving a few. (She is far from an uncritical fan.) She hangs out in grassy fields, picnic by her side, and guitar (or ukulele) in her arms. Chanterelle wanted to be with me as long as I would have her and had more faith in me than I could have in myself sometimes. She was never worshipful or fixated on me--she has an artistic streak that gave her something always in the back of her mind. I can't imagine what it says about me that I made a fictional lover who has other things she would like to be doing besides receiving forehead kisses and oral sex.

Chanterelle became a running joke with my partners. Melanie called her Mushroom Nose, chanterelle, of course, being a fungus. (Of course, I knew this. It is a pretty name and I find it unfair that Lily, Rose, and Jasmine are acceptable names but Chanterelle's is not). Emily rolled her eyes at mentions of her, this nonexistent paramour. Chanterelle existed as a skeletal ghost before that relationship, but she hadn't chosen that name and the substance to coalesce around it.

Amber had encountered her, but Chanterelle and she rarely occupied the same space. I doubt there was a reason to introduce the two.

Chanterelle was a defense mechanism taken up a literary notch, a mental escape that my current relationship did not have to be my final one. Onto this construct, I could give all the aspects and scenarios that might shake my fidelity: dedicating a song to me during a set she was playing, midnight confessions, a hundred moments where books and movies would have me fall in love with the woman who inhabited them.

I never met a Chanterelle nor tried to make someone in my arms closer to the woman born of my head. She was this tulpa I could check in on when my romance took on dimensions that spelled its potential end.

It wasn't as though, when the going got rough, I pouted into the insubstantial breast of Chanterelle. I didn't wish for Chanterelle in those moments, just hoped that the components that shaped her weren't such impossibilities in consort.

I once almost dated a young woman who told me that what she wanted more than anything was for a guy to burst into singing "Everything Little Things She Does Is Magic," in public and ideally with choreography. If a man did this, she would be his forever after. I told her that I could certainly try, despite being as melodic as a bullfrog. It disappointed her that I would even offer, showing how brutally I had missed her point. Now that I knew she wanted this, I could never do it. I would only know to do it because she had told me. Her perfect guy, her Chanterelle incarnate, would intuitively know to behave as though they both starred in an eighties movie.

(The young woman ended our light affair when I made the fool mistake of whispering over the phone, when I thought she had fallen asleep, that I thought I was falling in love with her. She lost the pretense of sleep and, more than that, the pretense that we were going to be more than friends.)

I doubt I was ever this crass when it came to Chanterelle. Whenever there was something that a woman could do to melt me, but which I all but knew a woman never would, I would give them to Chanterelle to hold onto. I could spin out the scene, imagine how much better it would feel than my partner telling me "I may love you still, but I am not in love with you," and then let go of the wanting.

Chanterelle never leaked into my published fiction; no woman in my books or stories is Chanterelle in masquerade. It might have been a way to launder her, to give her a sort of life outside me, but it felt wrong. My characters are my characters. Though I feed them pieces of my life and say these moments happened to them instead, they all have their strong personalities. None of them could bear the weight of a split personality. Nor, at that, would Chanterelle want to be anything more than a private fancy.

Chanterelle, though not ideal, is an ideal. She is a reaction, a fantasy. Among her charms is her personality--which I can feel like any of my characters--but she is meant to be a repository for in the shape of a woman. She isn't meant for the world of my novels, confronting vampires and invidious boyfriends (sometimes in the same body) and tangling with magic.

You might think that I would love her, my Galatea, but that always felt cheap. I couldn't love her because--in addition to being fiction--she was potential and unrealized want. I couldn't love the idea of things I would never have. I couldn't love someone who would never need my love during difficult moments. She was incapable of having them. Chanterelle wasn't going to lose a parent or fail a class. She is this creature I could make more perfect at a blink. She could be appreciated as a crutch from time to time, but she doesn't expect my love.

Chanterelle is a mental habit; one I think is harmless. She occasionally kicks me in the ribs with "Hey, can you imagine if someone sang an acoustic cover of 'Call Your Girlfriend' to you? Wouldn't that make you vibrate with conflicted desire?" but she suggests that I write that down rather than hope to live it. Given that she is an imaginary friend, she has decided to stick with the "friend" part of the equation.

Chanterelle, as much as she has an independent personality, has never minded anyone I have dated. She understood, in better circumstances, that I would never have the occasion or need to daydream her, but I did not contrive a jealous conniver. She would see no point in tempting me enough in dreams that I would leave someone in my waking world. She was only ever a peaceable curiosity, absorbing maybes as needed, and watching from the sidelines. She didn't ask much from me--my attention, my devotion, my fidelity, or my lust--but let me cast her in scenarios that would have made me flutter. She didn't overstep her bounds, a polite and well-mannered guest in my gray matter. Having not given her concentrated thought for years, she doesn't pop out in irritation (though my construct would have every right to) but a yawning wonder in what is new; she's been having a good nap.

It would be a cute button on this for me to say that Chanterelle took a backseat when I found the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Even my imaginary friend fakes gags at this twee greeting card pablum. Amber did not fulfill all the promise of Chanterelle--my wife is five inches shorter and a brunette, for starters--but I had stopped looking for "I wish." Chanterelle took her walkabouts, had adventures to which I am not privy, but Amber isn't what shooed her away. I had learned how to love someone completely with Melanie and demonstrated it with Amber. There wasn't room to keep handing Chanterelle all the ways I might have wished I had it in me to be stolen away. I had to commit myself not to my lovers, but to loving them without hesitation, even the half-second pause of a woman who doesn’t exist.

last watched: Paranormal
reading: Geek Love