A Life Invented

I'm a fairly creative guy. I hate to blow my own horn (which is how my cousin Walter broke his neck), but I'm all about cooking shit up like bacon...just in an imaginary way. For instance, this here slice o'Blogosphere Heaven was originally just a way for me to talk about the joys and pains of writing a book (joys = finishing shit up, pains = rejection letters).

Since I deal in fiction, I make up people all the time. I make up names, genders, descriptions...you get the idea. Everything that would make an otherwise imaginary figment into an actual, breathing entity.

However, I haven't always done this shit in my literary worlds. No, no. See, I once made up a completely imaginary girlfriend.

Now, now, before you all go away calling me a "Loser" and trying to hide the word underneath a cough, let me tell you the circumstances. I'm sure you'll be far more entertained. Looking back, I know I'm far more entertained.

So, my wee little town sat on the county line, which meant that half of the county went to Huntington County schools, whereas the other half went to Wells County schools. This was very convenient for the creation of an imaginary sweetheart, because, naturally, my girlfriend had to go to a different school. Thusly, she was doomed to spend her days at Norwell Junior/Senior High. She lived on the other side of town, which, conveniently enough, also had a lot of apartments, which provided for a convenient "Oh, I don't know everyone who lives up there."

I guess that I should say that I invented this girl late in the sixth grade and carried her through to part of the seventh grade. This will become important later in the story.

I had to pick a name for her. This was easy. For some reason unknown to me even to this day, I loved the song Sarah by Starship. Couple that with the fact that Sarah was an extremely popular name for girls about my age, and I had a ready-made girlfriend name. Given the amount of people of Germanic heritage in my small town, I went for a somewhat bland German-sounding last name. Thus, was Sarah Klein born.

Of course, I had to describe her to people who would ask, you know, for all those times I would casually slip into conversation that I had a girlfriend. Despite the fact that my tastes trend toward the saucy redheads and the dark-haired beauties, Sarah was blonde. The reason for this was because there were a lot of fucking blonde girls running around town, so sweetie pie Sarah could have been anyone of those. Because my favorite color is green, I gave Sarah green eyes. I also made her somewhat tall, just because.

And thus, a life was born.

Now, I'm sure you're sitting there, delighting in my tale, but wondering why such a suave and debonair motherfucker like myself would need to go out crafting his own Teutonic beauty rather than just roping one in myself. The answer to this puzzlement is simple: I needed her for the sex.

Now, despite the fact that I was on my way to the eighth grade, that I was well on my way to developing a full and unruly set of pubes, that I had already seen a real-live pair of boobs, had already sat through the puberty tapes that they give you in the fifth grade--you know, the one where they separate the boys and girls into separate rooms--AND sat through the puberty tapes where they don't separate on the basis of gender, my parents still had not had the sex talk with me. I emboldened the sex talk because, whenever it was mentioned by my parents, it seemed to echo. You know, as in "someday, I'll give you the sex talk".

The sex talk is a story unto itself and will be told in due time.

Suffice it to say, Sarah Klein was a bit morally unstructured. She didn't start out that way. At first, she was all cute and sweet, but as things went along, she began to be more aggressive. For months, my tactics didn't work, until finally, Sarah's family got a place at The Lake. I've told you about that, what with the girls across the lane wearing their small bikinis all the time and...well, that's a story better suited for another day, too.

So, one night at The Lake, I was talking with my friends up there and talking about how I was going over to Sarah's cottage when her parents went out for their late night boat cruise. We were going to be doing some nasty stuff, Sarah and I, over at her imaginary lake cottage. Oh, the fun we'd have. Dusk began to settle over us, and so my friends and I went our separate ways. I went over to my grandfather's cottage, my cousin--whom, for anonymity's sake, will heretofore be known as "Napoleon"--went to his cottage where my mom and my aunt were pulling a late night sit on the front porch and bitch session, and my friend Tammy went to her cottage.

Apparently, Napoleon went to my mom and aunt and recounted, in gruesome detail, all of the nasty things Sarah and I were planning on doing that night in her cottage. Napoleon had a bad habit of flushing all of the information in his brain out through his mouth in what I like to call "oral diarrhea." Now, bear in mind, I still haven't had the sex talk. About five minutes after we all went our separate ways, here comes Napoleon into my grandfather's cottage, looking for me. I got dragged down to my cousin's cottage and I got read the fucking riot act. You'd think that, since I hadn't had the sex talk yet, there would be no fear of me becoming intimate with my imaginary girlfriend. Apparently, this was not the case.

As I stood there, much like Christ before the Sanhedrin, whilst my mother called poor Sarah a whore over and over again.

Do you like how I just set myself up to be a Messianic figure? Hey, it's my blog, I can do what I want.

My mother asked me why I was afraid to bring Sarah around--because she was a whore? She asked me why I was ashamed to be seen with her--because she was such a whore? She asked me if my father knew that the girl I was dating...was a whore? I think she might have peppered "slut" in there a few times. The memory, despite its mirthful twist, is a little hazy.

The most amusing part was that my mother then went on to tell me about how she had seen Sarah sneaking around, hiding behind trees, walking up and down the lanes between cottages, avoiding my mother's steely gaze. This part really amused me. Somehow, this figment of my imagination, cooked up primarily so that I could finally get past this great hurdle in my life known as the sex talk had not only become real, but apparently had suddenly appeared arrayed in purple and scarlet, and drinking from a golden cup full of her abominations and the filthiness of her fornication.

And, despite the fact that I created her, that I owned the copyright on her character, that I had somehow missed the fact that she had become quite corporeal and real, I wasn't getting any. I was pretty fucking cheesed at this.

Eventually, I was grounded for my efforts. I think the time was two weeks. Oh, and as further punishment, I had to break it off with Sarah. Which was too bad because, really, I'm going to guess that she grew up and got totally hot. Or addicted to meth, one of the two.

Oh, and I didn't have the sex talk for another seven months.