TANKI

No, it’s not about lefties. TANKI was/is my childhood imaginary friend. I didn’t know that having an imaginary friend could be a big deal. It can be a sign of trauma, a coping mechanism, or simply pure imagination.

After many sessions of therapy, I came to realise I was a loner child. I started socialising late, and playing with peers later still. The main reason was my parents’ overprotection, though that is another story for another day.

TANKI arrived in my life when I was around five, perhaps earlier. It is enormously difficult for me to picture anything before the age of six or seven. “He” was/is an independent, content guy. He always had the best style and, most importantly, the best ideas for games. It was crazy fun playing together. He came up with the best routes for my toy cars, the character developments, the plot twists. Playing with him was always a surprise. Whenever I got stuck, he would arrive with something cool, something unexpected.

“He” was/is my best friend. He didn’t have a face. Maybe a figure, a shadow, though not a black shadow, more of a grey one. His presence was felt rather than seen.

I reached the age of seven, and it was time to start school. The first day of school, in a child’s world, is enormous. We tend to forget, but anyone reading this can pause for a moment and clearly recall the images, the rollercoaster of feelings, both positive and negative.

On that first day, the peers started networking. Looking back, networking is exactly the right word for it. Each child was talking randomly about their games, toys, food, parents, house, school things. I wanted to share too, so I brought up TANKI.

What I got was dead silence. Confused faces. At first no one understood me, so I repeated who he was, what we did together. And there it was. For the first time I felt the outside world coming at me, when one boy said, “but he is not real.”

Yes, I knew HE WAS NOT REAL. But I had not known that this mattered. In a bad way. In a shameful way, because I could feel those emotions transferring onto me, and I was so confused as to why. In this new world, things were categorised and valued by what IS, and what IS REAL, and those things that are not…

My world collapsed. It was not something I had ever expected. The outside world arrived, and the first thing it offered was the diminishment of what I loved, forcing me to accept that this was MADE UP, and apparently made up things do not carry the same value as other things. So I was ashamed, heavy, even guilty.

I got home, and I am not sure whether this part is made up too, but I remember feeling this RAGE. Any question, any reminder of that classroom, those peers, the excitement in their eyes at meeting each other for the first time, made me furious. I didn’t eat. I went back to my toys. I sat down and looked at them. Cars, animals. A warm feeling of joy appeared. So many untold stories. So many journeys we still wanted to take. I felt the salty liquid in my mouth and I cried like never before. A silent cry. A river of tears. An enormous feeling of hasrat, the Persian word for the ache of something you once had and can no longer reach.

TANKI was there, worried, alarmed, but encouraging.

The idea came to me this time. It was mine, not Tanki’s. He wouldn’t have liked it.

Music started. All my plays had a score, of course. The play was random, fast, a tiny Chevrolet in a chase and an escape, Tanki at the wheel, it was a little too fast for him, the route was insane, we passed different walls, sound effects, special effects, the car was handling it cleanly, handbrakes, shots fired, impossible manoeuvres, but Tanki was the best driver, he managed, he survived, brief moments of peace when we drove inside plants or into picture frames with grass and houses, then after leaving my room we jumped into the living room, different carpet routes, the speed climbing, Tanki was afraid and wanted to stop, but it was time, we had to go on, we found ourselves in the kitchen, no one was there, and after driving wild through the cabinets, the fridge, the pots, it happened.

I knew what had to happen had to happen. The car was in the middle of the four burner gas hob. Tanki and the car landed on the biggest burner. The crash happened, and the crash was fatal, because it ignited the burner. I watched Tanki and the car begin to burn, slowly melting. Tanki did not say a single word. He was alive, but somehow accepting the fate. The chance of survival was almost zero.

Then I hummed the end song… The car began to shrink, the door, the roof, the trunk blackened and burned away completely.

I turned off the stove hob. And I have not heard of Tanki anymore…

End of Part 1

Annabel