In Continuum.

Philip



That there
That's not me
I go
Where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the Liffey

Philip sat on the table with his body arched back, supported by his thin arms that looked even thinner against the bright street lights from outside the window. He was in a white short - as always - and he wore over those a gray checkered vest, like a student from a boarding school of some kind with his hair neatly arranged on top of his head, combed at the front into a neat line across his forehead. His brown hair glistered in the moonlight, and as I looked upon his face, he smiled to me from where he was. He appeared out of the shadows the moment my mother tucked me into my bed, and the click of the door was his cue to appear once more. He has been hiding in the shadows under the desk, and like any other time Philip decides to appear, he always looked neat and tidy, as if he just walked out from a hot bath somewhere. I waved to Philip and he waved back, and that is how our friendship grew every night in my bedroom.

Philip was my imaginary friend when I was a kid, and I am not ashamed to say that I had an imaginary friend. I'm not sure when or how he came about, or even his name, since he never introduced himself to me in the past, nor said a word to my questions or queries. He smiled, he always smiled at me with those eerie eyes in the night after my mother tucked me into bed. Philip was a Caucasian boy, a little older than me perhaps, and taller as well. He never spoken to me, not a word, and the name 'Philip' just got stuck in my head for some reason.

I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here

Years later, my sister found out about this imaginary friend after my confession, and made fun of me as if she never had her own intimate relationship with Ken the Barbie in the storeroom. The truth is, I was a child alone in this alien territory called Singapore back then. In school, I was the only Taiwanese, the only foreigner, and the only boy who hated soccer. I can't say I was a social outcast back then, but fitting in wasn't a smooth sailing deal either. Friends looked upon me with queer eyes and stares, judging me from afar and afraid to be within five meters radius of me, as if I carried some kind of deadly virus from Taiwan or something like that. Slowly of course, I mingled and I blended with my own efforts, but those days trying to fit in was tough. That must have been how Philip appeared in my life, late at night in my bedroom.

Being a foreigner to the country himself, I felt like I could relate to him very well. The same thing happened at home as they did in school, with the bunch of neighborhood kids despising this foreign import from Taiwan. I remember there was a time when I was downstairs skating, and the neighboring kids forced me into the corner of the void deck with their bicycles and had me cornered. I remember the feeling of the rubber tires against my elbow as I knelt in the corner, shielding my face against the onslaught. I remember imaging Philip coming to the rescue, since my mother was nowhere in sight. But Philip never came, because he was scared as well. He was terrified of these kids bullying me, because Philip was part of me, and I was petrified.

In a little while
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah it's gone

That night, the children from downstairs came again, and they started banging on the front door and pressing the doorbell. It was late at night, probably a little past nine o'clock, and I was at the door begging for them to leave me alone. But there they were, still on their bicycles, ramming the front wheels through the gates and making a melody out of the sound of the doorbell. "Go away!" I remembered myself yelling at the gang of kids, but they wouldn't go. The boy at the doorbell had a grin that defined evil for the rest of my life, and the other children were laughing at just how pathetic I looked by the door, kneeling there like a slave and begging for the chaos to stop. I remember crying so hard, and they left only when my parents came to chase them away.

The sound of the doorbell seized, the sound of it trailed into the emptiness of the living room, into echoes and then nothingness. I hoped dearly that Philip would comfort me that night, to tell me that it is okay to be alienated, to be bullied, because he went through the same thing before he met me. But from under the shadows of the desk that night emerged nobody, just the sound of the air-conditioning in my room humming away as the clock at the desk minded its own business. My parents left the room, after applying another round of medicine to the abrasion wounds on my elbows. I thought I heard the sound of Philip crying in the dark, but dared not ask him to appear - he never did again.

And I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here

A crazy thought came into my mind as I am halfway through this entry. Like the twist at the end of a Shyamalan film or a Hitchcock movie, the whole existence of Philip can be questionable. What if Philip wasn't the imaginary friend that I had when I was a child, but rather he was the real boy afraid of the bullies while I am the imaginary friend of his instead? Highly unlikely, probably not true. But it is an interesting thought that came into my head halfway through the entry. I am wondering if it is possible that whatever I am doing, eating, feeling or smelling is merely part of this other boy's wild imaginations, that none of this is actually happening in the conventional sense because this is all happening in a boy's head. What if it is not a boy called Philip, but a grown man called Philip and living in an asylum? With an imagination like my own, there could be a dozen different possibilities. But whatever it is, I haven't seen Philip since that night when he disappeared under my desk.

Despite his vanishing, my sister still teased me about him years down the road. Even now, if I mention his existence just one more time, she is going to use that and make fun of me all over again. Don't get me wrong, I am not ashamed of once having an imaginary friend, it's just that like Philip was a reflection of me, and a joke directed at him was indirectly pointed at me too. It's a warped thought, but it's not like an imaginary friend is a very normal thing for a person to think of anyway. After all, how do you define real? Like dreams in the middle of the night. Do dreams become reality only when your brain registers them as true memories? So what if Philip really does exist and I don't? Who is the imaginary friend here? Questions after questions, like the absolution of life, these questions are like recurring dreams that we don't have answers to.

Strobe lights and blown speakers
Fireworks and hurricanes
I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here