Aria's twelve now, and she has friends: real friends, she says. I guess she doesn't need me anymore. She's not the only one who thinks that. Her new shrink tells her I'm not real every session. Her parents tell her I'm not real. Everyone says I'm not. They say I'm only a made up boy who was there to help her cope with a rough childhood. But I am real. I'm not just a figment of her imagination. Am I? Maybe? Who knows? Not me.

She rarely thinks about me anymore; I never get asked to be her Prince Charming or listen to her ramble when the pain inside her becomes too strong. She never asks me to dance with her when she's feeling sad because no one asked her to a dance. I never get asked to read her the poetry that I've written or tell her a story. We don't spend countless hours sitting together and talking either. It has all gone piece by agonizing piece until now: nothing's left.

So I am alone. I'm no longer her best friend, Phillip. Instead, I'm an imaginary being that she scorns as a child's vain imaginings. I want to believe that she still loves me deep down and is hiding it to avoid being mocked by other kids. Sometimes I see her dreams, and I'm there, so maybe she hasn't completely rid herself of me. But mostly I just sit in a dark corner by myself, wondering when she'll come back to me, when she'll return to being her old self. The new self certainly isn't an improvement.

Each day I feel weaker and lonelier. My thoughts wander aimlessly more often as each lonesome day passes, and I've taken to roaming the small little room I've been confined to just to alleviate the horrid boredom.

She used to argue with them, you know. She used to tell them that I was real, defend me from those who taunted her on my account. Now she doesn't. She never speaks to or about me. I feel hollow, or somehow, if that's possible, less solid. Things seem like a hazy mess to me, and darkness is cast over nearly everything I see.

The silence is the worst part. The overbearing, ever growing silence. It becomes a deafening sound in your ears despite the fact that it's really an absence of sound. It weighs on you, dragging you down and laughing as it prods you over the edge to oblivion, insanity.

Can you tell yet? Maybe not. I'm insane. I wasn't always. But I am now. I am because I've become what I was sure I wasn't: an imaginary friend. I am locked away in some dark, dusty room in her mind: forgotten, rejected, despised. I represent everything she hates about herself: her schizophrenia. But with her shrink's help and plenty of those stupid white pills, she's healing. But I'm getting worse. Life continues on for her, and I lose my being as a result.

I close my eyes and softly knock my head against the cold stone wall of my prison. My fingers rub along the freezing floor ceaselessly as I rock back and forth gently, struggling to maintain my existence, my sanity. But why? Why do I do it? There's no purpose, no point, behind it. I'm already insane. So what do I preserve? I have no idea.

So I sit here in the dark as the last of the light winks out, and I let a soft sigh escape my lips. This is my fate, my end. I will be the forgotten, imaginary friend. But I will go knowing the truth: I'm not imaginary. Not to her. I was real once. I only became imaginary when the others convinced her I was part of her illness, her curse.

No, I wasn't imaginary back then. I was her only friend when the rest of the world could not or would not let her take part in their world. I was the one who rocked her to sleep and sang soft lullabies to her when her loneliness became too much to bear. I wonder now, as I sit alone, whether anyone will ever be that friend to me now that I'm the one who needs it. There will be no one... You are imaginary, her soft voice condemns. Doctor Douglass says you are. Everyone agrees with him. You are imaginary.

And with that, I feel the last of my existence slip away.

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