1. Ghosts (Night).
Ghosts should never visit when you’re lonely, in the suburbs, without company, because you lost all of your friends to shallow fights or negligence. But they always do. You see them, coming up the driveway, in the dress you always loved, humming a song, wearing a scent, that you just can’t get out of your God damn head.
The ghosts are hazy visions hovering on the peripheries of migraines. They live on the self deprecating self constructed self contained border between what you think you might remember and what might actually have happened, if things actually happen. There are no promises, you see.
She snuck in like whispered smoke through the tiny crack in the window and warmed her rigid body against mine, occupying the space on the hard wood floor beside me. She nuzzled her nose into the crevice of my neck and purred like the mangy cats which littered the filthy alleys.
-Was it nice out there? I asked, trying my best to hide what little life her presence brought back into the stone I called a body.
She moaned in irritation, pulling our flesh closer together -Attempting to pull my mouth shut.
-Where have you been? I waited. I could see the curls of her hair from the corner of my eye - but I did not move, lest she escape.
-It was like that man. That friend of yours. You know who I’m talking about? The one who traveled across the world on the fishing boat and landed here illegally or something- you remember? He was dark as almonds or something, blue eyes-
-What the hell does this have to do with any it? The words seethed from between the gaps in my clenched teeth.
-Just listen. I faltered out of the womb onto the cold slab- you know? Alone, and the doctor forgot to bring a goat, so I was left to fend off the father and barter what I could just to get my foot in through the door of life. So birth has been all I have been doing, over and over, trying to see if I come up with a better hand each time I try.
-Why can’t you just say what you mean! I shouted, but as I reached to grasp her arm she floated into the air like a withering burning paper, all evaporated as she slipped through the very crack she had entered through. I spent the rest of the evening attempting to pluck the stone from my throat, hoping for the embrace of a sleep which was just out of reach.
2. The mail.
I received the package in the mail. When I cut it open a tiny shabby notebook fell from its womb. The story of a ghost. My brother, frighteningly obese, hovered in the darkest corner of the house, the sounds of his humid heavy breath filling every crack and crevice of the room.
-Whats that? The giant shadow whispered
- A letter from a ghost. I mumbled.
I had been receiving the packages for a few months now. They would come, poorly wrapped and labeled, and addressed to ‘Noone Inparticular’. They had become worse than the actual specters who had been haunting my dreams - I would return home to find them littering my porch, stinking like the rotting corpses of a past life which I had forgotten to dispose of. Despite this I could not turn away from their humble pleas. These narratives- the glimpses into the shadowy windows of the moving houses of ghosts - were some how my own narrative, intricately woven into and behind the shallow forms of my daily existence.
-Another letter? My brother said with a heavy sigh. Weren’t you just complaining about the symphony of screams hissing through the pipes when you showered? How the subtle sobs leaked through your pillow from the memories in the walls, keeping you up all night? And now you open another one of her letters? The bulky phantom sighed again, which filled the room with a great wind.
-How can I resist? I muttered.
The letters of ghosts are often illegible. This is not surprising, seeing as the only way they can actualize their thoughts in physical form is to convince some creature - a scorpion, a snake, perhaps a feral cat - to dictate their hissing whispers onto whatever scraps of used tissue or abandoned newspaper they can find. I had become well versed in the inky scratches and claw marks of the cats, but the endless ambiguous spirals and coils which the snakes would use to relay messages still left me perplexed.
This journal was a masterwork - a magnum opus. It had been written by an entire eco system. There were pages written by giant beetles, by hives of bees, wolves, cats, venomous and benign snakes and serpents, there was even a page written by what looked to be a toddler. Based on the diction, syntax, and use of classical literary allusions I determined that the work as a whole had been constructed by a single author. It had been bound by the jagged thorny branches of rose bushes, and the package as a whole reeked of garbage.
Ghosts speak in the language of dreams - so it took me years to read and decipher the journal. I eventually concluded that it was most definitely sent by her. As a whole the journal was a beautiful work of art which chronicled both her physical life, our life together as lovers, and her life after losing her physical form.
After many years I let my eyes close, a simple act I tried to avoid, and suddenly the shadowy wind ceased, and I was alone. When I opened my eyes the hulking phantom was gone, as was the furniture, it was day- and the tattered notebook which held the letters from a ghost was nothing but a vague memory which stained the floor of the past.
(Interlude: Refrain)
Two weeks. Within two weeks they both had died. He - swollen beyond belief on a tiny hospital stretcher unable to breath (Disease). She- on a twisting highway, beneath the bridge, under the truck (Misfortune).
I destroyed everything - the couches, the family photos, the beds, the desk, her clothes, his books - and wandered aimlessly through the twisting corridors of the empty house. I cut off the electricity, buried the television in the backyard, and slept face up on the hard wood floors, waiting to die.
Then the ghosts began to visit.
He was first- I would wake in the middle of the night and feel a strong breeze blowing throughout the hallways. This mystified me, and I began to search every corner for some sign of mystery or transcendence. And then, in the darkest corner of the old abandoned house, I saw his shadow. Obese like before his death, he floated above the ground breathing heavily. It took months for him to communicate through the wind, but eventually his voice was present in every crack in the walls.
I waited anxiously in hopes that one day she would appear - wearing the lovely yellow dress she had worn the day she had died. But she never came. The only signs of her presence were the packages. In the beginning they were almost unnoticeable - a yellow leaf on the driveway, or a folded paper on the roof.
Then, only during moments of deep intense sleep she would appear. If I looked at her she would disappear as soon as she had come. I tried to decipher the nonsense she would speak to me, but this only led to frustration and remorse. To have a love so near at hand and so far away was to puncture the walls of dreams and hopes which which I would construct to get me through the seconds.
And then I did not hear from her again, save the packages.
These haunted my daily existence, and I only gathered the nettle leaves and acorns from the backyard for sustenance in order to retain the chance of receiving her messages. The hollow stone of flesh which was the body fell cupped in the hands of wind and chance, hoping to receive the key which might lead to the unlocking of whatever it was I was searching for.
3. Translating.
I gathered the strenuous notes I had taken from the deciphering of the journal and began to work on reconstructing it. I had collected the general metaphors and plots of the narrative as well as the particular creature who had transcribed each page.
The process consumed all of my time and once I began I hardly left the abandoned house. I would sit in front of the window at my makeshift desk, which I had constructed from old moving boxes, and worked until my shallow shabby fingers ceased to function.
I worked every icy day, in front of the tree limbs which shook like fragile crystals in the wind’s embrace, for what seemed like an eternity, translating the life of a ghost who I had once loved so dearly. Her narrative was contrived at times, and her portrayals of me were obviously biased and often bitter. Regardless I attempted to remain objective and translate the remaining notes the best I could.
When I came to the final page I realized that it had been the most troubling and puzzling piece of the entire journal. This was the key. It had been written by a sidewinder. Its narrative was circular in nature, fluid and rich in its texture. This page, written on a tattered and worn pullout from a local drugstore’s weekend sale, held the key to the entire journal, and yet I could not understand its mysterious phrases. This drove me to a state of unending madness, and the long shadows which had began to circle my eyes dripped down my long face and engulfed the entire house. Blinded by this madness - by the very ambiguous nature of the world which had left me in a state of unknowing, I abandoned the scraps of fickle words, crawled under my cardboard desk, and closed my eyes.
4. The Mud of Existence.
When I left the house my body was pathetic and fragile. Spring had come, and the neighborhood in which I had lived for so long had changed. The rose gardens bloomed in majestic reds filling the skyline with blood and sun petals. The fences had been destroyed - the world was fresh and new and shined with an odd sense of tangerine hopes which flooded every doorstep.
I could hardly walk, and my pace seemed excessively slow and pathetic. My fingernails curled around my fingers in a disgusting display of elapsed time, and my clothes which hung like saintly robes dragged tattered and torn as I wandered the streets.
I was in search of her. I could not find the key, no matter how hard I would try the pieces of her labyrinthian puzzle sat jagged like my loose teeth upon the floor of my mind.
I confronted his ghost before I left.
-What’s the answer? The words rolling from my eyes down my cheeks.
-There is no answer. Whispered the wind
In a fury I attempted to fight his truth - to wrestle it to the ground in hopes of strangling some delusion from its neck. But with this the house was silent - the wind had ceased - I was alone.
I searched the streets for any sign of life - my body was wrinkled and I walked hunched beneath the heavy load of my search. My beard dragged on the concrete and I felt blinded by the unceasing punishment of the midday sun.
I finally wandered into a muddy alley and waded my way through the thick dirt which caked my legs struggling and willing some sense of movement forward until the face slipped from the wall and into the mud - until the body had nothing left to hold on to and fell away - until the skin was raw, the lips were chapped and broken, the hands cracked like dry earth- until I finally saw the body down on the floor, in the mud, drowning, pathetic, useless.
-Pick it up, she told me, her golden voice whispering metallic tones through the fingertip branches above.
-Well? Pick it up-
But how do you pick the body up from the choking mud of existence when you’d rather kick it while its down? To beat from it all the delusions you have submitted to, all of the prayers left on sterile lips, all the loves left unrealized in dreams and lies you tell yourself to make it through the day. But not for the necessity of the limbs, the unreconciled need to go on, to leave the body where it sits and shits forever would be but the only reasonable option.
The tangerine morning burnt its hopes onto the coming day as the wind danced through the lush and vibrant sky of the past.
5. Ghosts (Morning).
As a child I would play in the evergreen forests of North Texas, which were filled with the immortal essence of life and the constant reminders of death. Their floors were sand and dust and even the pathetic ponds seemed to have the water of existence stolen from them by the greedy unforgiving earth. It was here where I would enter a fantasy world, becoming both the hero and the villain - that which came to destroy all it could grasp in its tiny unseeing hands and that which would reconcile and save what it could through what forces it might discover. And to this day I have played out these roles until they have become only the bones and the fragile tendons which hold such absurdity together. But now the old forms have become the hollow vessels of cliche, and I sit and hope, approaching at a maddening pace the dust, for something of substance to grasp me in the wind or the silence.
