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During my preteen years, my best friend began pretending to be a boy named Alex, spinning a story of being from a different religion but willing to convert for me. I never met Alex but we went on to text, on and off, for the next few years. I felt unlovable enough to happily embrace this delusion for a considerable length of time. When she confessed it was her all along, our friendship shattered, leaving me feeling embarrassed and betrayed. It would take me a decade more to see us both for the repressed and fanciful little girls we were, a revelation that lingers in my thoughts.In my early twenties, I came across “From the Land of the Moon” by Milena Agus. The simple story, where a young woman recounts her grandmother's life of arranged marriage, infertility, and solace in a passing romantic encounter with a veteran at a spa, only to unearth a hidden notebook after her death revealing that the affair had been almost entirely fictional, struck a chord. I saw myself in the grandmother's struggle, becoming aware of the absurdly thin and rather beautiful line between imagination and madness. It forced me to confront my own delusions, the consequence of a trauma similar to the one which prompted the grandmother's longing for compassion so intensely it drove her to imagine kindness into reality in its absence.These reflections resurface with greater frequency in my late twenties. Is it any wonder some of my favourite books growing up were stories of unrequited love, such as [b:Love in the Time of Cholera 9712 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1644691354l/9712.SY75.jpg 3285349], [b:The Great Gatsby 4671 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490528560l/4671.SY75.jpg 245494], [b:Great Expectations 2623 Great Expectations Charles Dickens https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1631687432l/2623.SY75.jpg 2612809] and most recently [b:White Nights 1772910 White Nights Fyodor Dostoevsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1450699039l/1772910.SX50.jpg 4111509]? How many of us must hold onto such functional delusions to survive life?
