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Mr Nobody

As a child, my family lived next door to a family who had a little girl around my age. I was elated! A “built-in best friend” was as close as 20 paces away! To my delight, our bedroom windows faced each other which allowed us to talk even though we were both at home!

I often wondered about my new best friend and what it must feel like to be an only child. While most children from large families complain about having to share toys, rooms and wear hand-me-downs, my friend would wear her clothes once with no one to inherit them. She would play with her toys until she grew weary of them, she would be alone in her room with no one to talk to before dropping off to sleep at night. Of all the things that only children encounter, my little friend missed talking to someone at night. Whether it was to talk about school, piano lessons, or cute boys who carried her books home from school. It brought comfort to her as she gazed into a vast sky with twinkling stars. You can imagine her excitement when we discovered we could talk to each other from our bedrooms.

One night as we leaned out of our bedroom windows, we watched shooting stars exploding in the sky. I asked my friend if it was difficult to make new friends when she moved. She thought for a moment and replied, “Sometimes it is…when that happens, I just talk to my best friend n the world. He always understands.”

“Who is your best friend in the world?” I inquired. “Mr. Nobody. He’s always with me, he never leaves and he talks to me at night when I am lonely.”

At the time, I didn’t understand fully the obvious make-believe friend reference. But, a couple of years later when she and her family moved away again, I realized just how important this coping mechanism was to her. I wonder about my childhood friend, I suppose that is why I wrote about an only child in my book, “The Pond.”

Mr. Nobody was certainly a “Somebody” to her.