Reddish Yellow

cw: language, physical violence

Onyx wasn’t a sun-kissed blonde. She was a moon-bitten brunette — a dark-haired fairy who emerged from the shadows and into the lives of those who needed comfort the most.

I came up with her in seventh grade. It was kind of late in my development for an imaginary friend, but I had problems no one in the real world had been able to solve.

The thing about Onyx was that anything that happened to me happened to her. She was me, and I was her. When my dog died, her dog died. When I got my period, she got her period. She was the only other person in the world who knew exactly what I was going through — the exact shade, exact hue of pain brewing inside me.

I learned about the special connection between Onyx and I the morning my stepmom chopped my hair off.

“Don’t move,” she said sharply, standing behind me in the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors.

Without hesitation, she chopped up to the nape of my neck, exposing the constellation of moles on my back.

The dark curtain of hair I’d hid behind now laid on the bathroom floor. “Much better,” she said, pleased with my new look. “It was getting to your head.”

Later that day at school, I felt the stares as I looked down at an equation I couldn’t solve. The glacial bite of the classroom’s AC whispered insults against my neck, and I panicked when I instinctively grabbed at a piece of hair to twist around my finger, only to grasp at empty fistfuls of stale classroom air.

But that’s also when I noticed Onyx perched on the pink eraser tip of my pencil. Her wings, once vast and iridescent, had been clipped down to blood-crusted nubs. Neither of us had to tell each other what had happened. We already knew and gave each other that knowing look that said, what the absolute fuck.

Our pain in that moment was the color of a bruise — a reddish yellow anger muted by hope that this was all temporary.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I told her, and then she held my fingertip and told me the same thing back. “You didn’t deserve this,” she assured me, and I assured her that she didn’t deserve it either.

We were in the same boat, after all. Neither of us knew where our boat was headed, but it’s what I liked most about our friendship. We didn’t give each other advice or tell each other to loOk oN thE bRiGhT sIdE when both sides were dark. We just acknowledged to one another that our experiences were real and that our feelings were valid.

You didn’t imagine anything, she said to me one day. The only thing you ever imagined was me.

Over the next few years, we continued growing together and hurting together. I eventually made real, tangible friends, but none of them ever had the empathetic precision Onyx possessed.

For example, I’d tell my real-life friends about something that happened to me. I’d grasp at comparisons to try to translate the emotion.

“You know, it’s kind of like when . . . or it’s kind of like this . . . do you know what I mean?”

“You mean kind of like this?” they’d ask.

And I’d have to lie. “Yes, exactly.”

By the time we turned eighteen, Onyx and I had moved out of our homes and into dilapidated yet peaceful one-bedroom apartments. We got matching receptionist jobs and filled our apartments with candles and books and ornate mirrors we could see our now long hair and fully grown span of wings in.

At first, nothing changed between us. As usual, she perched on my shoulder anytime we had a difficult day and we’d ask each other what was wrong with the world and what was wrong with us.

It wasn’t until I met my husband Richard and we had a baby girl that our friendship started to change. I started thinking about Onyx less, and on the rare occasion she did appear, we didn’t have much to report on. Our wings had grown back and we had baby girls whose hair and wings we’d never chop off. We were content.

Then one day while I was nursing my baby, Onyx just flew out the open nursery window. I guess I was just ready to move on and so was she.

In a way, I felt betrayed that she flew away from me so easily. But because I’d been betrayed, she’d technically been betrayed too. By me. I didn’t need her anymore, and she didn’t need me anymore. It was that simple. When life got better, we parted ways.

I’d never told Richard about Onyx. I often wondered whether he’d still want me after looking inside my mind and finding a small magical girl fluttering around.

I’d spent years believing I’d escaped the life that led me to create Onyx in the first place. And so I’d hid that girl fluttering around my head from Richard until she disappeared altogether.

Then, after five years of no Onyx and being a wife and mother who was content with her life, I found out that Richard had his own secret girl fluttering around his head, his heart, and his life.

“Why?” I asked him over the last dinner we’d ever have together.

“I don’t know,” he said flatly. “She had dark hair, just like you, and a smile, just like yours.”

He smiled smugly. I said nothing and looked at him blankly. He shrugged and asked me what I wanted him to say, as if there were a correct answer to all of this. It made a reddish-yellow pain dawn inside me, and I looked down at my untouched plate, poking my fork into a ripe grape tomato the color of my pain.

That's when I saw her.

She was perched on my silverware, changed only in the ways I had changed these last five years. Except unlike a real-life reunion, there were no awkward or painful formalities to preface the unscripted parts. No long-time-no-see type of stuff. That's how it was with imaginary friends. They could just disappear from your life for years, for half a lifetime even, and then just reappear one fateful day as if you were already mid-conversation.

I looked down at her and she looked up at me, the way we always had, both of us beaming a reddish-yellow hue, and, without explaining anything, we knew.