When I was pregnant the first time, I was absolutely sure that I was going to have a girl. I didn't give much thought to the boy's name, because we weren't going to need that. The girl's name was Rowan.
We chose not to know her gender ahead of time, and when I went in for the C-section, I was thinking, "Rowan, Rowan," and after a long period of mucking about, which seemed to take place in Turkestan because I had had an epidural, the doctor lifted out...Tristan.
Now, a living Tristan was much realer than an imaginary Rowan, and after a day or so, I forgot all about her. But three years later when I was expecting again, I found that the name Rowan, still my favorite, could not be used. Rowan was the bold first-born girl. The new baby was not Rowan, for Rowan had lived her imaginary life and gone away to where imaginary people go.
I've had the same experience online several times. There was a fan fiction writer i liked, both personally and as a writer, who kept poultry and lived in the Pacific Northwest. We had some conversations about her writing and I read her journal entries. I imagined her as a tall, dark-haired woman of about 35 with a basket of chicken feed on her hip. Eventually she wandered away, as people sometimes do from their journals.
I can't remember how I got into the journal of another Pacific Northwesterner, who wrote original fiction and owned a bookstore, but at a certain point -- maybe when she mentioned her chickens -- it occurred to me that this was possibly the same woman. I asked her and she said yes, that was her. Now this chicken lady is about my age, grey haired and not terribly tall. But I haven't been able to revise my idea of the first one, so she is still out there, looking like the picture on the Sunmaid Raisin box, with the basket of cracked corn in her hands. Maybe she is with my first-born daughter, Rowan.
This happened to me again tonight. Another LJ friend, a wise and thoughtful gay man and fiction writer, revealed himself to be a transgendered person who still presents as a woman but feels like a dominant man in relation to her submissive husband. Now I'm interested in this new person, but where is the old N, that gay man that took such pleasure in his submissive boyfriend? N would say that s/he is still here, but that is the N that she knows. The N in my mind has now split off, like an alternate universe, and gone away somewhere.
One of the deepest loves of my life has been for my college English professor. I could write a small novel or a large novella just about that relationship, but to take what is pertinent here, after ten years of odd, but, on my side, passionate, friendship, we had a falling out. At the moment of our parting, the real Ken and my imaginary Ken took on separate lives. What surprised me was how I kept on dreaming of him in the same evolving way I always had -- searching for Ken, sitting at cafe tables with Ken, standing ecstatically at the top of a swaying tower with Ken. Gradually, the dreams of searching but always just missing him abated and I more often found him. When Tristan was born, Ken rode toward us down a nighttime lane on a rickety bicycle and I showed him, "this is my son."
Of course, the Ken of my imagination was only somewhat related to the actual Ken. What the separation made me consider was how much Imaginary Ken overlaid Actual Ken even in what I thought was my contact with him in the real world. If I could go on having this relationship with him when he was no longer in my life, who was I really having the relationship with? And of course, this generalized to other people as well.
These experiences give me a profound respect for what I don't know about the people near me. Paradoxically, they have also helped my see more clearly, because I've learned to see both; I see you and I also see, like a glittering ghost-print, the imaginary you I bring to the encounter. With Tristan, for instance, I see all the teenaged boys I wanted to love me when I was a teenaged girl; and I see the energy and drive and freshness I felt; and I see an unspoiled version of myself, as I would have been without so much trauma; and I see a masculine me, my animus, and I see Youth incarnate, with a garland on his head. Then, when I see all that clearly, I have a chance of seeing through and around it to the real Tristan in front of me.
I suppose that is one of my subjects, should I ever manage it - the continuous intermingling of the world outside one's consciousness with the wellspring of images and processes within it.