i was born in nyc. on my mother’s birthday. july 5th. i loved skyscrapers and watched them like a hawk through the chain-link fence of my preschool’s rooftop playground, and i cried as they receded from my airplane window, the day we moved to palo alto.

northern california was nice and warm and sheltered. but my dreams were dark and twisted. i’d imagine myself lost inside labyrinthine subway stations, abandoned by my mom on concrete, graffitied streets of a fictional new york. i couldn’t sleep with the lights off. i couldn’t sleep alone, curling up at the end of my parents’ king bed each night until i turned eleven. my dad bought me a blue-and-white feathered dreamcatcher. he hung it over my bed and told me that’s where the bad dreams could go. and it worked for a while. placebo effect.

around that time, i befriended a girl named avery. we loved to play pretend, building imaginary worlds like sandcastles. we were princesses and sisters, but avery was cursed with metamorphosis, so at times she was also my pet. a rabbit-and-spider-like creature named sushi. the two of us rode dragons around the universe and solved quests handed out by a wise and prophetic, human-sized beetle.

one thing avery made clear was that this world we had built was real. realer than the one we inhabited. realer than palo alto. that the king and queen of this imaginary kingdom were our true parents. and that all other imaginary worlds crafted by classmates on the playground weren’t the same. those were fake. those were just kids playing pretend.

did you ever play with imaginary people growing up?

i invented other worlds.

kingdoms built like skyscrapers.

alexander with green eyes.

he wasn’t real.

i never saw him in the flesh.

avery would point her fingers

at the air

and say, “kiki, look,

he’s standing right

behind you.”

i’d turn my head and

he’d be gone.

“he’s just hiding in the bushes. you make him nervous.”

no, he wasn’t hiding.

he simply didn’t exist.

but now,

here he was.

bare-chested beneath my covers.