I hope the feeling is mutual

The purest instance of an undemanded tie on this site, and the only place in the corpus where somebody living inside a parasocial relationship states its definition. Anne Frank wrote to Kitty - "Dear Kitty... I like writing to you most, you know that don't you, and I hope the feeling is mutual" - and there was no circumstance in which it could be returned. The hoping is the whole of it, and she named it herself before anybody had a word for it. **It was a network, not a friend.** She addressed letters to eight imaginary correspondents - Kitty, Pop, Phien, Conny, Lou, Marjan, Jettje and Emmy - and by November 1942 she was writing only to Kitty, but what she had built was a social circle with **no reciprocating nodes in it**. Every tie inside it was one-sided and the correspondents were addressed as though they might yet answer. That is a structure the corpus had not described, because a single imaginary friend is the version everybody writes about. **The listeners were invented twice over.** Kitty, Pop, Phien, Conny and Lou are drawn from the Joop ter Heul books of Cissy van Marxveldt, a real Dutch children's series Anne admired; Marjan, Jettje and Emmy she made up herself. The far end is fabricated at two removes - first the character, then the correspondence - which is `imagined` at its strongest and not the same object as a companion who happens to be silent. **She addressed the object as well as the person.** "As long as this still exists, I cannot be sad" - she is speaking to the notebook about the notebook, so the tie survives the removal of everything it was attached to. That is `archive` operating inside a `bond`, and there is no other instance of it here. **And then it became collective, which is the other half of the entry.** The diary was published in 1947, after every member of the family but Otto Frank was dead, and has since sold something like thirty million copies in more than sixty-five languages. The most private one-sided conversation in the western canon became a mass reading relationship with a dead child. Every reader is a tooth in one machine, none of them built it, and the thing they all turn against is a notebook a teenager addressed to someone who could not write back. **And the machine got it wrong, and the error is the argument.** The most quoted line in the world's most-read diary is a truncation. It does sit in the final notebook Anne wrote, but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that it "has been taken out of context" and that read in full - about three paragraphs - "it is part of a quote about a great deal of despair and longing." What follows the famous line is: "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death." **The optimism is the misquotation.** The most famous private sentence in the literature has been replaced by its opposite by people who were not there and never wrote back - which is what happens when a one-sided text goes public, and it is the whole argument of this site arriving from the one place it could not have been constructed. Otto Frank said he had two Annes, one that belonged to him and one that belonged to the world, and received thousands of letters once it was published. The far end of the tie eventually acquired a reply - addressed to a dead child, in enormous volume, by strangers.