The Imaginary BFF of Te'o's Imaginary Girlfriend Speaks Out

Not just Lennay's imaginary family, but all of her imaginary friends, including me, and their imaginary families were just shocked when it came out that Lennay's boyfriend wasn't imaginary, and never was, but a real-live person.  Naturally, when you hear a name like Manti Te'o, you just think that's not a real person, and you can imagine our shock and disappointment that Lennay had been involved with someone she hadn't made up at all but a real person who, like, existed and everything.

I still can't get over it.

That this news came on top of Lennay's make-belief death just makes it that much harder.  If you're a real person, I guess it must be pretty hard going to an actual funeral when somebody dies, but for imaginary people, going to a make-believe funeral when nobody fakes her death can be just as hard.  Or if it isn't just as hard, we have to pretend it is, and that's the hard part.

When I think back on all the make-believe memories I shared with Lennay, the fun times I imagine we had together, the intimate personal secrets we would have made up to tell each other if either of us had really existed, it makes me pretend to cry.

In all of the imaginary conversations I made up where Lennay pretended to tell me all about Te'o, he just seemed so fake, and her stories about him seemed so unconvincing and inconsistent, I was convinced that when we pretended she had cancer and then died in a car wreck while running from drug dealers, that Te'o would cease existing and then we'd go on to imagine someone else.

But he didn't.

It all seems like a terrible, terrible fantasy.  But it's real.

That's the weird part.