Why Do We Miss People Who Never Existed?

There is something slightly extraordinary about missing someone who was never real.

Not an actor.

Not someone we once knew.

A person who existed entirely between the pages of a book.

And yet somehow, years later, we can still remember them.

Maybe not every detail of the story. Maybe not exactly what happened in chapter seventeen or where every scene took place.

But them?

Absolutely.

The way they spoke.

The way they entered a room.

The thing they always noticed.

The particular way they loved someone.

The way they made another character laugh.

The way they touched them.

The way they didn’t.

Because sometimes the most unforgettable moment between two characters is everything that happens before their bodies finally meet.

The look held slightly too long.

The hand at the small of her back.

The mouth that almost reaches hers.

The restraint when both of them know exactly what they want.

And then, when sex does become part of their story, we don’t necessarily remember it because it was explicit.

We remember how it felt.

The desire that had been building before it.

The intimacy inside it.

The particular way those two people were together that could never simply be transferred to another pair of characters and feel the same.

That is when sex stops being something that happened in a novel and becomes part of who those characters are to us.

Perhaps that is part of what makes certain fictional people impossible to forget.

They become specific.

Not an idea of a man.

Him.

Not an idea of a woman.

Her.

Their humour. Their contradictions. Their confidence. Their appetite. Their habits. Their home. The way they order champagne. The way they move through a kitchen. The way one of them looks across a table when the other isn’t paying attention.

Tiny things.

And somehow, those tiny things begin creating a person.

Then something even stranger happens.

Years later, we meet someone.

Maybe it’s the way he stands.

The way he looks at you before answering.

Something about his voice.

His confidence.

The way he reaches for your waist.

A particular smile.

And suddenly, without consciously searching for the memory, you think:

He reminds me of that character.

How incredible is that?

Someone who never existed has become recognisable enough that we can see traces of them walking around in the real world.

Perhaps that is why the characters we love rarely disappear when the final page ends.

We have spent hours inside their lives.

We’ve been in their homes. Sat at their tables. Heard conversations no one else heard. Watched them fall in love. Seen what happens when the door closes. Been allowed into bedrooms, private thoughts, tiny gestures and moments of intimacy we would never ordinarily witness.

We know them differently.

And perhaps romance makes that connection particularly intoxicating because we don’t only experience the character.

We experience what it feels like to be loved by them through the person on the page.

We feel the attention.

The desire.

The devotion.

The heat.

The way they notice.

The way they choose.

The way their presence changes the emotional temperature of a scene.

It is one of the things I love about writing The Artist.

Severin and Rhett aren’t interesting to me because I can describe who they are.

They become interesting in the details of them living.

Rhett arriving with dinner, wine and flowers because Severin has been painting all day.

Severin singing far too loudly in her studio while he reads in the next room.

Dancing together in the kitchen while dinner cooks.

The attraction between them.

The sex.

The laughter.

The quiet intimacy that exists beside all of it.

Those moments are where characters begin to feel less like people being written and more like people whose lives we have somehow been allowed to enter.

And maybe that is why, eventually, we miss them.

Not because we forgot they were fictional.

We always knew.

We miss them because for however many hours we lived inside their story, knowing them felt real.

And every now and then, someone walks into a room and reminds us of them.