“Free verse poem about a child who grew up with an imaginary friend”

Once, in a cloud-shaped corner of a sunlit room,  
she whispered secrets to the humming air—  
a creak of floorboards, a hush behind the door,  
and there:  
her steadfast shadow, softer than a memory, waiting.

They built kingdoms with shoebox walls,  
named the dust motes, decreed the bedpost a dragon’s perch.  
He misunderstood nothing,  
not the days she wore a red cape to breakfast,  
nor the evening she cried, small fists  
balled around stories that fell apart in her hands.

His eyes—blue as pencil smudges,  
his smile—moon-bright, unwearied by realness,  
his listening deep as the silence  
between two heartbeats when she wished  
for one more minute—no, a lifetime—  
of belonging within that borrowed world.

Years pass, and the room thickens  
with remembered laughter and the soft thud  
of markers dropped on carpet.  
His chair at the table pushes itself in,  
her voice shapes his name only in dreams.

But sometimes, in the margin of night,  
when loneliness brushes the edge of sleep,  
she finds him again— shadow boy,  
her secret sibling sculpted from breath—  
standing just beyond waking,  
as real and as kind  
as any love she ever made for herself.

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