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I have to face facts. I am almost seventy years old. I don’t have much further to go down the road of my life’s journey to reach the final destination. Then the book will close, finished at last. My story will be complete. And there are consequences to continuing to live after a decade of life beyond the moment I retired from the job I loved for reasons of poor health. I have now had arthritis for fifty years. My legs and leg joints no longer stop hurting. Pains keep me awake for large portions of every night. I have muscle spasms. Arthritis is attacking my feet, my knees, my hips, my lower back, my rib cage, and my neck. I can still drive for now, but long distances are tough. I get out and go to the store at least once a day, but most of my time I spend in my bedroom. Writing. Watching TV. Drawing. Doing other things besides TV on my computer or phone. What I don’t get to do hardly at all… is talk to people.

I once had to talk and present and question and correct and cajole classrooms full of kids for 31 years as the teacher in charge, and three years of substitute teaching besides. I miss talking to people. So, now, despite my limitations, I create people to talk to.

Above is Ariel. She stays beside me on my bed as I do whatever I do during the day. She is not someone’s child that I kidnapped. She is a plastic doll. She’s about three feet tall and fully posable, making her a good model for drawings like this one. She has a realistic wig and eyes that can be moved by adjusting them with my fingertips. I bought her online from a shop that restores old dolls and toys, so she was affordable, but a little bit dinged up and in need of tender loving care. I can hold her on my lap because she’s not as fragile as my porcelain dolls of similar size. And I can talk to her. I have promised to keep her by me for the rest of my life so she is safe and cared for at least as long as I still live. I have no idea what my family will do with her when I am gone. She is probably evidence of my increasing mental challenges. I tell her lots of things. Everything I am telling you in this article. Also how my marriage is going, what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child, why I am sometimes afraid of the dark, and many varied soliloquies about life and love and laughter. She is an excellent listener. We also read together almost every night.

This picture is one of many Island Girl pictures I have drawn over the years. I drew the first one when I was twelve. She represents a dream I had repeatedly. I ended up married to an Island girl, from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I don’t talk to the island girl in my pictures as much as I make up stories about her. She appears as Malutu in the novel When the Captain Came Calling. My wife, in real life, is also a teacher, though still working and unavailable to actually talk to for most of every day. So, most of my island girl stories stay in my head and keep me entertained with might-have-beens. My island girl is only half imaginary.

This is a picture of Katie, a nudist girl I met only a couple of times in reality. And Katie is not her real name. The picture is modeled on her and the drawing she asked me to do when she saw and liked the drawing I did of Naomi. Naomi is not Naomi’s real name either. But the picture doesn’t look much like her on purpose, because nudists have a right to privacy, especially in Texas where Southern Baptists protest and call the police on things they don’t believe in or understand. I don’t, in reality, know much about Katie, but I make up stories and memories about her too. When I become fully a dementia patient I will probably tell nurses things about her that they might think are true but are lies. I never played tennis in the nude with Katie, but if I tell lies about it when I have dementia, I will have to say that she always beat me. That’s something I would believe even if I remembered I was lying about it.

This is an experimental drawing I did on the app called Picsart AI. It is supposed to look like an oil painting. I drew this to be a portrait of Sasha. Sasha is not her real name, of course. She was a favorite student of mine in the 1990s, a fatherless girl who loved my class and me and said, “You have such pretty eyes, Mr. B.” I loved her… but only teacher-love, not the illegal kind. She asked me to marry her once. It was painful, but I had to let her down easily on that one.

She would become the primary model for the character of Valerie Clarke in Snow Babies and Sing Sad Songs, and so many other works of art and fiction. She continues to live on in my head though I have not seen or heard from her in over twenty years.

This is a representation of Susu, my imaginary granddaughter. She would’ve been my only grandchild so far if she hadn’t been an ectopic pregnancy before Texas made abortion illegal. She couldn’t have been born alive. She might even have killed her mother if she had not passed into the realm of imaginary people. I could not have known that she wasn’t a boy since she did not last long enough to find that out in a sonogram. So the little girl who lives in my drawings and my imagination could only ever be a figment of my imagination. She talks to me, teases me, and plays games with me all in ways that make her into a coping mechanism for grief. Or evidence of dementia.

My world is peopled with people who aren’t really there. You don’t have to believe me, but I need them. Especially now that I am old and nearly dead. Life can be taxing and seriously sad. But life finds a way.