The Blake Paradox

A few years ago, to get out of work for a couple of days, I told a lie. Sure, that’s how it’s done. You say you’re not feeling well, your basement flooded, your car broke down, there’s been a family emergency. Some even say there’s been a death in the family. I went one step further. I called my manager one morning, sobbed into the phone and said, “My best friend, Blake, got into an accident last night and died. I’ve been at the hospital all night.”

Two days later, when I finally went back to work, everyone came up to ask me how I was doing. They asked me what happened, if I wanted to talk, assured me that they were there for me if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Tears readily sprung to my eyes, and surprised even me. The story rolled off my tongue without me having thought it out. There was an accident. My friend was driving home after dropping me home on our way back from a movie. It was late. Some guy, drunk, ran a red light and swerved to avoid hitting a parked car, landed into the wrong lane, and crashed into my friend.

The HR Director called me into her office to ask me if I was ok. She told me about her ex-husband who’d recently passed away, and who’s death she only found out about one day as she was browsing the Internet. She asked me if Blake’s family had been notified and I told her his dad lived in New York and I didn’t know how to get in touch with him. I said I had keys to his apartment, and she suggested that, difficult as it may be, I had to go back there and see if I could figure out a way to get in touch with Blake’s dad. She asked if I had someone who could go with me. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. She took it to mean that I was in shock, took my hand, and said, “I want you to go home. Take some time off. But please tell me if there’s anything you need.”

It struck me then, that they really believed me. I realized the implications of this big lie I’d made up, and would be compelled to continue making up for as long as they remembered.

Though no one had ever heard me mention his name before, Blake was a close friend of my main character in the novel I was working on at the time. I knew my characters really well, very intimately, having been the one who created them. Two months later, when my computer inexplicably crashed, I lost my novel and this Blake character. I realized that I had lost this fictional best friend, once again.

This time when I cried, there was no one I could share that loss with. My co-workers thought I’d lost him a while ago, while my friends outside of work, didn’t know he existed. My nostalgia was implacable. On top of that, was the guilt of having plunged Blake into non-existence; I felt I had killed him.

My conscience nagged at me, so I constantly recreated Blake, by making him a recurring character in my writing. But in every piece that he appears in, he is lost to me. He is the best friend who dies, the lover who leaves, the stranger who comes into the main character's life for a brief tryst that is never consummated, the friend who’s ashes a character is bringing back to his family.

Now, years later, I have a co-worker/intern/assistant named Blake. Every time I speak to him, I feel guilty. When I say his name, I feel like I’m lying. I’ve become friends with him but every time we have a conversation, I’m thrust back into my fictional world, the only place Blake actually exists, if even for short periods of time.