Mr. Moogy Was Imaginary

I used to think every kid had an imaginary friend, so for years I never questioned the strange things about mine. His name was Mr. Moogy. I "met" him when I was around five years old, and my parents always assumed he was just a product of my imagination. I would talk to him for hours, draw pictures of him, and tell my family stories about the things we did together. The only thing that ever bothered my parents was that I never described him like a normal imaginary friend. I never said he was my age or someone I created. I talked about him like he was someone who had always been there.

As I got older, Mr. Moogy slowly disappeared from my life. Like most children, I stopped talking about imaginary friends and eventually forgot about him. Or at least I thought I did. Then, years later, strange things started happening again. I would wake up with the feeling that someone had been standing near my bed. I would find objects moved around my apartment, hear quiet footsteps when I was alone, and occasionally catch glimpses of a figure out of the corner of my eye. At first I blamed stress, exhaustion, anything that could explain it. Then one night I heard a voice I hadn't heard in decades whisper my childhood nickname.

I started searching through old boxes from my childhood, trying to prove to myself that I had invented everything. That's when I found my old drawings of Mr. Moogy. The pictures were exactly how I remembered him, but there was something I had forgotten. In every drawing, he was never facing me. He was always standing behind me, watching. In one picture, I had written a sentence in my child's handwriting: "Mr. Moogy says he will stay with me forever." I don't remember writing that. I don't remember ever being afraid of him when I was little, but looking at those drawings as an adult made me realize something terrifying. Maybe he wasn't my imaginary friend. Maybe he was something that convinced me he was.

After that, I started noticing him everywhere. Reflections in windows. Shadows at the end of hallways. The same figure appearing in places where nobody should be. I tried everything I could think of to get rid of him, from ignoring him to destroying anything connected to my childhood, but nothing worked. The worst part is that he never threatened me. He never screamed or attacked me. He just waited, the same way he waited when I was a child. And now I'm starting to wonder if he wasn't following me all these years. Maybe he was simply waiting until I was old enough to understand what he really was.