Ever since I was a kid I had a bad habit of picking up strays. And the weirdest stray I ever picked up was a man. At least, when I got older I assumed he had to have been a man. The green tinge to his skin must have been my childish imagination or the lighting. The strangeness of his voice must have just been an accent my young ears had never heard.

I found him lying face down in the garden. Awake and aware but weak and unable to move. It took all the strength in my tiny body to drag him to the house. For days, my mom and I nursed the quiet man, who refused to go to the hospital, back to health.

And as mysteriously as he came, he left.

Now why would I bring him up in a book about my many, many imaginary friends? Because this was not the last time I saw this strange, strange man.

I saw the man many times when I was young. I would catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye, coming in and out of the woods behind my house. Sometimes I would catch closer glimpses right before things disappeared. It was never anything expensive or important, usually just daily necessities like food and little scraps of clothing. And everywhere he stepped, flowers bloomed only to disappear shortly after.

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When I told my mom about it she told me it was just a figment of my imagination and, as the man eventually stopped appearing, I slowly started to believe her. And so he faded into a simple joke between my mother and I whenever things disappeared or flowers grew in strange places without warning.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, long after my mother had passed away and even this in-joke between us faded from my mind completely, that I saw him again, one last time.

On an utterly routine business trip to a faraway state, I saw him in a park sunbathing in a patch of flowers that looked strange and out of place. As I stared at him, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar, he woke up in a panicked state.

The same panicked state he woke up in over 40 years ago when he lay injured and starving in my mother’s garden. He looked exactly the same in every way. When I recognized him, I started to make my way towards him. A person riding a bicycle almost ran into me and I looked away for a moment. But when I looked back he was gone. When I finally reached where he had been laying all that was left was a patch of quickly wilting flowers.

It was then that ‘Rose Boy’ was born. I’m still not entirely sure if the man was real or my imagination but either way I owe my whole career to him, my real life ‘Rose Boy’.