Imaginary Frenemy

 
She found herself thinking about the celebrity again—it bugged her that she couldn’t will thought of this person from her head. She wasn’t particularly beholden to gossip and didn’t particularly enjoy this person’s paintings. It was their style of play, how they presented themselves in photos and interviews, enigmatic, cocksure, in-on-the-joke and above everyone and everything. They were eccentric, so people said, they dressed at an angle counter to convention and made seemingly dangerous, cryptic career decisions that in the end only fed into the mystique of their aims and overall program. They were well-known for their standoffishness and while this seemed categorical among the famous who intended to retain some semblance of privacy, their behavior was so willful and solicitous it couldn’t be anything but calculated to hook a rube’s curiosity. 
I’m not interested in these people, she’d tell herself, then shake her head. Shake her head as if she were trying to shake the demons out. The goal of the famous person was to play for a living, to live a while in people’s estimations; the price for such luxuries was an occasional intrusiveness. To become a human myth, you need willing mythographers. You need people who think so little of their lives they’ll feed you scraps of them to help you grow larger and larger until the size of you becomes solid as fact, un-ignorable. It’s no way to live but certainly is a subtle way to die. 
She knew some facts and details about this person, their upbringing, their history. Their origins as a young mortal. They had been a childhood actor then they had quit acting; they had tried to attend a college (Ivy League) but quit after a semester. As far as she knew, they had never worked a job a day in their life; both their parents were lawyers so their early years of aimlessness were most likely well-funded. Then they discovered painting. Their paintings were discovered through connections their parents had in New York. There was an opening in a gallery, there were purchases of overpriced canvases…a month after the opening they moved to Brooklyn. They called making paintings “work” and referred to themselves as a workaholic but that soon changed when they gauged the consensus of attitude around them, realizing this was old hat and unpopular. Thereafter they spoke of themselves as lazy, a bad employee of their own canvases and will to create; yet somehow more “work” was made and sold and converted to money, the money in turn converted to time away from the common demands of life. They no longer had to make a living, since they were invested in laziness as a mode of life. It worked for them. 
This was homespun, of course, a story. This was what the celebrity intended you to know and therefore think of them. Their confidence was blithe and so definite it didn’t require your fascination for continued survival. But the truth was more the opposite: without nobodies like herself thinking of them, this person would be deprived of a stage. They’d be acting for their shadow cast at their feet, not even on a wall. It would be a lonely, fruitless thing, their calculation, cutting themselves off from themselves and promoting no one. Pull and push, seduction and rejection. Why was she so interested? Why couldn’t she cut thoughts of this person from her head and be rid of them? The answer was plain but not so obvious: because she wasn’t sufficiently interested in herself. How’d she become so boring? she wondered. The question itself was a perfect sample of the problem ongoing. She wondered about others because she could hardly hold her own attention, thinking of this other person, herself.