Little Weirds(8)

I stood on a spot between the bathroom and bedroom and I said to the bossy eternal cosmos, Well, just let me go. Just let me go. I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better, for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme. I have many grievances and no place to set them down, and I am cranky from having to shoulder this burden of reactions, like I am a fucking Ox that should carry your unsellable wares. I am tired of buying my own flowers. I am tired of having to hold my breath through Valentine’s Day the way you do when you drive past a graveyard. I want a valentine from a normal person who is horny. I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love.

And you know what? I thought it all and it was sour but full of energy and I looked at the dog and said, Will you be my valentine? And just like every other man I’d met so far he couldn’t exactly understand me but he winced at my tone and just like every other man he was ruining my house and so I let the brown circles overtake me because at least when you die it is not your job to hold all of these dark disks for everyone anymore.

And I took pity on the little dog and gathered him to my chest with my rotten-grocery-store-plum heart and I used my last bit of whatever I had to just make myself die. I turned into the only circle of light and it didn’t even feel great or like liberation and I just floated up and lightly bonked the ceiling and then I sank back down and settled on the floor and I just admitted that I love Valentine’s Day and nobody loves me and I’m horny and nobody is here and I just died.

The small circle of myself lay there on the floor between the two rooms that are for shitting and sleeping.

But what is so hard is that even when I die my light still stays on.





Ghosts

When my parents moved in to our house in Massachusetts, the house I grew up in, it was filled with the furniture of the dead people who lived there before, and maybe with some of the stuff of the dead lady who lived there before the most recent dead couple. Layers of deaths. They had to clear a lot of things out and away. They had to make it their own. My mother was getting wheezy because of the dusty runner on the stairs, and so she and my father decided to rip it up. When they did this, they discovered a package, or maybe a few packages of letters. They were love letters. They were written to someone who had lived in the house, but they weren’t from the person’s spouse; they were from someone else. An other.

It’s a little gossipy and scary to tell this story, because my parents knew the descendants of the dead, of the person who had had this extra love. Therefore, they also knew the descendants of the person who knew nothing about their love’s extra love, but walked up and down on the words of that love every day, not knowing that little strips of their partner’s heart were underneath their feet, promised to someone else.

The letters were written by a man who sailed the seas. He was a sea captain. A male male, maybe stoic and rough, so that he could stand the seas, but still crackable even while craggy, because he had been caught up in this forbidden love. My father took the letters to his office, thinking that he would write about them.

This is the first step toward seeing a ghost: Discovery followed by meddling. Taking something into your life, something that is clearly a powerful object from another’s life experience. That night, or a few nights later, my mother smelled my father’s pipe smoke. It was late at night and she called out for him to come to bed, but when she turned over, my father was there, snoozing away. So she said, “You left your pipe burning. You’re going to burn down this new old house that we just bought.” But my father said that he hadn’t smoked his pipe that night. My mother then came to the natural conclusion that there was a robber in our house, and that the robber was smoking a pipe while he stole our things.

My father went out into the hallway, to do what to the robber? I’m not sure. But what happened was this: My father stood there in the hall, smelling that pipe smell, and watched as a sea captain–type person smoked a pipe and climbed the stairs. My father says that he saw the man, but didn’t see him, but saw him. I don’t know what my father said to my mother, but somehow she ended up knowing that he had seen a ghost, which is not great for anyone, especially a couple with a young daughter asleep in her bed.

My father knew somebody who knew some things about ghosts. This person said the thing that now we all know is true about ghosts: “They have unfinished business. Those letters aren’t any of your business. Burn the letters and the ghost will go away.” And he did. He, my father, burned the letters, and he, the ghost, went away, as far as I know. But sometimes we would smell the smell, and I would wonder why it was coming back at just that moment.

My mother and sister also saw the form of a woman wander out of the den and ascend toward the light fixture in the hall, but I can’t seem to find any connection to that story except that it is terrifying, and I put it on my list of events that I’m glad I missed.

But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary. I thought of what his ghost brain must be saying. Was he sad and mad, saying, “You made me live without you and so I died this way, living without you, looking for you. And now I am quite literally dead on my feet.” I think I am afraid of this happening to me. Taking the risk, believing that love and its people are not predatory, and being a part of the sharing of hearts, only to have to be separated and spend all of my living life waiting for the sharing to really turn into the joining of hearts.