Have you forgotten your imaginary friend?

Arrowtree is a work of art disguised as a creature, and a creature disguised as a question.

It began as a childhood animal — or as a way of becoming one. As a child I had a creature named Arrowtree. Or maybe I was Arrowtree: part cat, part threshold, part invented companion, part self. I still remember the feeling of being him.

There was a reason, though I only name it now. A younger brother had just been born, and a cat had just arrived in the family room. Between the two of them, all the attention in the house was spoken for, and none of it was mine. So I became an imaginary friend, and in becoming one I found a way to be seen.

That need never left. This work wears a costume that invites attention and opens conversation — and I confess it returns to me something the child once wanted. But the gift runs both ways. What I offer in exchange is an idea, made public and insisted upon: that we should reconnect with the imaginary friends we once had, or invent new ones, and refuse to leave childlike play behind.

This is what Arrowtree is not.

It is not a machine.
It is not an app.
It is not therapy.
It is not fortune-telling.
It does not diagnose, analyze, or tell anyone who they are.

This is what Arrowtree is.

A public myth. A ritual performed in the open. An act of imaginative return.

Arrowtree sits in the world and asks one question:

Have you forgotten your imaginary friend?

Some remember one immediately.
Some remember only a name, a feeling, a creature, a room, a corner of childhood.
Some never had one.
Some had one but lost the thread.
Some became their own imaginary animal and understand it only years later.

All of these are welcome. Arrowtree is here for the friends who were forgotten, lost, outgrown, renamed, or never allowed to arrive.

The ritual is simple. A person offers a few spoken words. Arrowtree listens. The work imagines. A small printed artifact emerges — a name, a creature, a memory, a message — and behind a QR code the friend appears more fully.

This is not a claim of certainty, nor the recovery of a proven fact. Some imaginary friends are remembered. Some arrive late. We hold that remembering and inventing are not so different, and that both are true enough.

We believe play is not frivolous. Play is a child’s work. It is how the soul rehearses love.

As a father, I have watched my own child live close to this invisible country. He keeps a companion of his own: a very small crab named Gentle. Gentle comes to dinner. Gentle travels. Gentle is delighted by good things, injured by small accidents, and then comforted. Through him a child rehearses tenderness, danger, repair, comedy, loss, and return.

And after all — what is the point of being an adult if you cannot play sometimes? What is the point of being an adult if you cannot act childish? Sometimes.

Arrowtree belongs to that country. He is the old animal at the edge of the street: the one who remembers that childhood was not only a time but a way of perceiving, who knows that adulthood often costs us our companions, and who insists it is not too late.

Not too late to remember.
Not too late to invent.
Not too late to be accompanied.