My Imaginary Boyfriend.

So here I am, another day in my office with no windows, watching the clock tick, tick, tick by; looking at the picture of me and J from his Christmas party two seasons past and convincing myself that it’s real. I’m also eating thin mint cookies that miraculously presented themselves in my freezer this morning when I was looking for berries for a breakfast smoothie, so my mouth kind of tastes like Christmas, which is a nice tie-in (All right, magda, you’re cut off from caffeine effective: now).

I was talking with a friend of mine last night; she called to invite J and me to a barbeque she’ll be throwing next weekend. My calendar was free but, in typical J fashion, he had an outstanding obligation.

“You know, Magda, I’m beginning to wonder if this guy exists!” she said. Jokingly, of course, but it gave me pause: I’ve been dating the guy for a year and a half, and she’s never met him. She’s been my friend since college.

Granted, I don’t see her all that often, but every time we have managed to coordinate, J’s been absent, or has had to duck out at the last minute.

Now I’m trying to think if there are other people out there who suspect, even subconsciously somewhere in the back of their heads, that I’ve just hallucinated him: the ghost guest perpetually on magda’s arm. He wanted to come, but. He wished he could be here, but. He may drop in later, but. A distraction born of desperation, do they think? Or maybe a brain tumor?

J is one of the most over-involved people I’ve ever met, and that’s where I lay the blame. He rides on a bicycle team. He trains for and runs marathons. He plays and takes lessons for the mandolin. He plays in (I’m sorry to say) a mandolin band. He manages/provides legal advice to a “real” band. He does a lot of “on the side” legal work for musicians/entertainment people. He works on the Hill being all legislatively influential and important.

Here’s a little contrast. I go to work from 9-5. I sometimes grade essays. I read a lot of novels. And that’s all, folks.

Sometimes it’s really hard being in a couple with this kind of imbalance; it leaves me with a lot of sort of “grey area” time on my hands.

I’m constantly saying no to my single friends, the friends who tend to call spontaneously on a Friday night and want to hang out. Especially on weekends, there’s kind of a presumption that I’ll be spending the evening with J, and maybe I’m just getting old, but at the end of the week sometimes I like to just stay in. Even if we do nothing but hang out on the couch and watch dvds, it’s us time, and it makes up for all that we miss mid-week. I need more notice to disrupt that status quo, and it doesn’t take long for the phone calls to slow, slow, slow down. Ah, magda’ll be with her boyfriend, they say.

With my luck, the nights he’s out and I’m wishing said single friends would call and we could plan something, it’s my coupled friends who rise to the occasion (go figure) and they (naturally) want to go out in pairs. It’s easier to be a single girl amidst couples than one half of a whole, though neither is an enviable position; I feel like I spend all my time out with these friends missing J, and fixated on what they’re all thinking. “Oh, poor magda, couldn’t get her guy to come out,” they say in my mind. “Poor magda can’t find a boyfriend who’ll stand by her and be there.” Or, worst of all, “poor magda, this J character probably doesn’t even exist.”

He does, though! And he would come out, he’s just busy! Right? Right.

Really, though, he’s been SO busy recently that we’ve really only talked for a few minutes each night, right before I go to bed. I wake up and I start to wonder if it was all just some crazy dream. It’s only Wednesday, right, and the weekend wasn’t that long ago … but something about this week has felt so long, like it’s been AGES since we’ve seen each other, like he’s on the whole other side of the world and our only communication comes via very crackly, WWII-era transatlantic phone lines and the calls are so expensive and the background is so noisy that we can only get a few words in.

Right.  So now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cookies to eat and a boyfriend to call, just to hear his voice and prove that he’s out there, right here, in this same city. And not just in my head.