The Truth About Shadow

When I was really small and the world was really big and scary, I had an imaginary friend who I had become very reliant on. His name was Shadow and it was kind of a play on Peter Pan's Shadow, and how Peter always had to sew his Shadow back onto the soles of his feet. As a child, surrounded by other children who also loved Peter Pan, the pre-woke generation that didn't see the Racism depicted in it, I felt safe enough to bring my Shadow everywhere.

When I got a little older, Shadow began to feel kind of childish and I would bring him around when it was summer school or when I was being babysat at Janet and Nelson's house. We did everything together. Shadow would sit next to me at their dining table while Janet made us white rice with ketchup, the way she knew I liked it. He'd follow me into their backyard where we'd spend hours swimming from the light side of the pool to the deeper end of the pool (and back), where Nelson had put a couch in the garage, Shadow and I would sit and play.

Janet and Nelson weren't really my aunt and uncle, though I called them that. They were my mom's, stepmom's, friends from work, the kind of people who said yes when she needed someone to watch me on short notice. Which was often. My mom worked two jobs back then—one at an office in Commerce selling Metal during the week and on the weekends she worked odd hours at the mall selling women's loungerie. I didn't understand why we needed so much money or why she was never home. That was when I was also the babysitter and would watch my brother during the weekends.

That's when Shadow spoke the most.

At Janet and Nelson's, he'd whisper to me while I pretended to nap on their couch, the afternoon sun making patterns through their thin laced white curtain as the water from the pool created patterns along the window each night when we'd go home. It was those summer days that made my childhood important. Because these were the moments something else was beginning to process.

By high school, I was much more optimistic, and feeling good about school, excited to tackle art and STEM programs. Shadow had been gone for years by then. I didn't think about him much anymore—he belonged to a version of me I'd outgrown, tucked away with other childhood things I'd left behind.

But for shits and giggles, I decided to bring Shadow to school with me. We went to classes together, made friends together, it really felt like I had finally sewn myself to my feet it felt safe to care to think about creating and processing what it was that I went through in Elementary School in my Shadow.

I was good at moving forward. Good at being busy. Art projects, Journal writing, college prep—I filled every hour so there wasn't time to look back. My brother was in middle school by then, playing basketball and hanging out with his own friends. Mom had switched to just one job, better hours, better pay. We'd moved on. Things were better.

My first year in high school, I was really nervous about making new friends and staying safe. I had been bullied everyday in school up until ninth grade. In ninth grade I wanted to already have a friend elsewhere, someone who knew me for summers at Janet and Nelson's and did not care, someone who wanted to protect that gently as I ventured away from that age.

Shadow didn't judge me for the years of silence in middle school, didn't ask why I'd go quiet at lunchtime around my friends, or why I'd learned to make myself smaller in hallways. He just existed beside me, familiar and constant, while I figured out how to exist too.

In art class, when I'd sketch in my journal, Shadow would lean over my shoulder. I'd draw the pool at Janet and Nelson's, the way sunlight broke apart in the water. My art teacher, Ms Pink, said my work had "an interesting duality—like you're drawing memory and feeling at the same time." I didn't tell her that I was drawing what Shadow saw, the way he remembered things softer than they were.

In nonth grade, I really got into Social Media and that's where Jake came through. I wanted to be safe online because, well, it's online and at timeline so I pulled from Shadow and created Jake, Jake was playing on the surface on Tagged.com as a boyfriend, but really he was just me protecting myself from being harassed into a relationship with an actual stranger that could have been someone who was doing the same thing I was doing except with more malicious intent.

In my journal entries for English, I started writing to Shadow instead of about random prompts. Small things at first. "Remember when we used my lunch money to buy popsicles after school?", slowly these little notes to myself became bigger things. Structural worlds and misadventures became my escape into Shadow through these journals.

I was documenting something, though I didn't know what yet. Building a record of a childhood I was only beginning to understand I'd survived.

By sophomore year, I had a small group of real friends. People who texted me first, who saved me seats, who knew my actual name and face. Jake had served his purpose online and quietly retired, the way Shadow had years before. I didn't need the protection anymore, or at least that's what I told myself.

But the journals kept growing. Pages and pages of conversations with Shadow, memories that felt both mine and not mine. Sometimes I'd write something and not remember it happening that way. Other times I'd remember something new entirely, like my brain was slowly developing the photographs it had kept in the dark all these years.

One night, I was flipping back through an old journal from freshman year when I found an entry I didn't remember writing. The handwriting was mine, but messier, younger somehow:

"Shadow says it's okay that I don't remember everything. He says he remembers for me. He says that's what he's for—to hold the things that were too heavy for a kid to carry alone."

I closed the journal and sat with that for a long time.

That's when I started to understand: Shadow wasn't just my imaginary friend.

He was the part of me that stayed small and safe while the rest of me had to grow up too fast. I started going back through all my journals, reading them like they were written by someone else. Because in a way, they were. There were gaps—whole summers I couldn't quite piece together. Days at Janet and Nelson's that existed only in fragments: the feeling of chlorine burning my nose, the sticky vinyl of the garage couch, Nelson's laugh that always seemed too loud.

Shadow had been there for all of it. Shadow remembered.

But I was starting to realize that Shadow didn't just remember the good parts—the popsicles and the pool and Janet's kindness. He remembered the reasons I needed him in the first place. The reasons a little kid would split herself in two: one part to experience, one part to witness. One part to endure, one part to escape.

I thought about how Shadow only appeared in certain places. Never at home, where I had to be the responsible one, the babysitter, the oldest daughter. Never at my grandmother's house, where I had to be polite and grateful and quiet. Only at Janet and Nelson's. Only at summer school. Only in places where I was supposed to be taken care of but somehow still felt alone.

Only in places where something felt wrong but I was too small to name it.

Junior year in College, we read about dissociation in my psychology elective. The teacher talked about how trauma doesn't always look like one big terrible thing. Sometimes it looks like a thousand small moments of feeling unsafe. Of being too young to understand why your body was trying to leave a room your mind had to stay in.

I raised my hand and asked, "What about imaginary friends?"