I have cried over characters who never lived. I have stayed up past midnight to finish arguments with people made of sentences, and I have mourned a medium named Mabel as if she once borrowed my coat.
Actors get asked whether it is strange to feel real things about invented lives. It is the job description. The stranger thing would be standing in a rehearsal room full of breathing people and feeling nothing.
There is an honesty to fictional grief: it arrives without admin. No flowers to order, no casseroles, just the clean feeling itself — which is why stories can rehearse us for the real losses, the way drills rehearse a crew.
So here is my defense, entered into the record: caring about invented people is not confusion. It is practice. The heart keeps what it learns, whatever the syllabus was made of.
