Anybody seen my Imaginary Daughter?

A certain tension in my torso and a crawling pain moving around my chest and arms were looking for interpretation. Turns out I am missing people I have never met (some might argue that they don’t even exist) — in turns, my childhood imaginary friends, fairy-like godmothers that I am sure I have, a twin brother, the lover forever waiting for me, or the perfect breakfast-cereal-ad parents.
Consistently for a couple of months now, my heart has been genuinely crushed by the great need for this girl here.
I would love to have a daughter. A daughter my age. A beautiful, rebellious girl in her late 20s, with an amazing smile and just a few subtle signs of our blood connection — a couple of my flaws and charms rearranged in a more flattering way — enough to make me feel proud to belong in her genealogical line. A lovely being made through me, but completely outside of my control. A magnificent proof of evolution, a better version of all her ancestors. Both kindly humble and defying in front of us all.
I would love this perfect human, filled with imperfections that I would admire so much I’d refuse to acknowledge she could ever do wrong.
I would love this girl, both child of mine and mature being, a creature to admire and protect, teach and learn from. I would enjoy her distant look, her eternal adolescent feel, her need to leave me behind, still tangled up in an occult bond that cannot keep us apart. I would watch her incessantly as she would keep becoming who she already is, confirming and exceeding my every expectation — the sheer pleasure of seeing a sculpture taking shape on its own.
I would love a daughter my age. No clone of mine, no friend of mine, no sister. A daughter. A being that I would love above all, for reasons out of my mind’s reach. I would give birth to a grown-up child, a real infanta born already prepared to be queen. Once part of me, but always as different from me as the next soul. I don’t want myself, in any way. I want another. But one sublime other that would be invisibly tied to my heart and flesh, owing nothing to me while I give her my all.
We wouldn’t need to be separated by age, or be tied together by years of dependency to form this one beautiful bond. I wouldn’t need to have seen her cry helplessly as a baby, drink my milk, skin her knee or have her ask me for comfort when her heart has been broken. I only need to know that she simply IS my daughter — then all the right feelings would fall into place.
She would be pair and stranger to my every cell, a carved scepter out of my very bone. My love and longing would breathe around her. “You are here because the universe is greater than myself, and because my need for devotion is undeniable. We get created because we have the gift of needing to give to someone else. I will offer you what you will offer to your own child — never back to me.” I am sure she hasn’t heard a single word. That’s what makes her who she is. I love how daughters never listen — that is their way of loving you back, I gather.
We all live at once, in the same age, with the same age. We somehow become the world, and find that the miracle is in the spaces between us — the spaces that define our indestructible connection, that of being everything and nothing to each other, that of always being too far, for the burning love of the mother, and always too close, for the need of freedom of the daughter. With this in mind, I try to learn to let this yet unborn girl go every day, and fail; repeatedly.
It is her that I miss most right now. And I keep thinking of her every time my eyes stop on a silky cheek of a beautiful girl, or on a footprint in the grass next to a blanket and an open book, or on a half-empty cup of tea left anonymously on a table. She is always there, somehow, my girl that cannot be. It is her presence that is strolling through my head, and her absence that is creeping in my heart causing this sweet discomfort. She lives somewhere in this world, maybe outside this present, maybe inside of my mind. I like to believe I carry at least a print of her inside of me, like the true mother that I imagine myself to be.
