For weeks I’ve been trying to write about ghosts, but I can’t get the words to stick. They are everywhere and elsewhere, a haunting in presence and absence.
I rarely talk about my work here, this place where I come to stretch and yawn, exhale the dust that settles in the corners of my mind. But more and more it creeps in, the way they come to me in sleep, they way they linger in snatched fragments of light. It begins to leak; I see them in the park, hundreds of years compressing on the same path, temporal insanity under an arc of trees. They say, they beg, they plead, they whisper - do you remember? does anyone remember?
After love ends, there is always the period where you wait, patiently, for the feelings to transform into something else; for the place they occupied in your brain and your heart and your bed and your life to shrink into a small, manageable thing. For a while, everywhere they are not is lacking. Entire neighbourhoods razed to ruin by flimsy spectres; a hologram outline of the two of you lingering in all the places you once loved each other.
But then eventually there are new people, and once again something begins to bloom in the cracks between the concrete. So much of any beginning exists only in imagination. Hours spent making space in the complex architecture of my mind, stretching the gaps between interactions and filling them with something else; possibility, hope, fear. I build rooms and corridors out of conversation, a labyrinth we might one day live in.
And yet I am still so surprised to discover that anyone might conjure me in my absence, even in passing thought. How hard it is to believe I too might occupy some small space in the interiority of other people, that a version of me might exist in the recesses of your imagination.
Do I exist your mind? Do I speak? What do I say?
I meet a friend for dinner on a wet night and I tell her it feels like something, even if I can’t explain what that something is. There’s nothing explicit or external or tangible to grasp onto, but rather some quiet yet unwavering instinct, some unrelenting belief that we’re inching slowly towards each other in tiny, incremental steps. I want to protect it, this fragile, precious thing. I stow it under my coat, tuck it into my scarf just above the collar bone. I carry him silently through my day, in rooms and cities and countries far from where he is. She asks if hurts to want him.
I spent entire years heartsick and closed off, lingering in the shadows of my life for men who existed only in illusion. But this time, even at a distance, wanting him feels like turning towards the world. And if in the end I discover that I was alone in the wanting, it will never have been to waste. For better or for worse I lost every pretence from the start. There was was nothing left to grasp but the rawness of me; bloodied elbows and bashful apology. The way I want him only brings me closer to myself.
By April everything has become unbearable. I write encouraging notes to myself all over my apartment, feeble motivational words and smiley faces in the hope that it might transform the agonising uncertainty of my life into something exciting and optimistic.
It doesn’t. I make an appointment with a psychic. I need to know what she can see in my face, what future she might predict. I want to be told that everything will work out, and I want to believe it. I want to be warned that trouble is ahead, and refuse to believe it - I knew it wasn’t real, none of this is real, I’m a rational and cynical person. I already know there is trouble ahead. I don’t need to pay fifty pounds to find out.
Everyone keeps telling me that it’s going to be fine, but it’s not enough. I need certainty. I need a stranger to peer into the pixels of my soul through a screen and come to a grand, definitive assessment. I want to believe that such things are possible, that the future is entirely knowable. I no longer want to be involved in the construction; I want to lie down on the floor and wait for an asteroid to hit.
I take the long route home after dark, curving around the edge of the island past the garden where the morgue once stood. Seven years I’ve lived with these ghosts. Sometimes they appear in my apartment, wet from the river, and I have to say please, go, please. I wrote your story and I carry it with me but I need my peace. We’ll talk in the morning, I can’t do this in the dark. I once accidentally took Nancy Spungen home from the Chelsea Hotel, back when it was still half-rubble and we’d spent an evening exploring the back rooms with a friend of a friend. She glowered in the corner of my Ludlow Street sublet all night, anger still palpable after all these years.
What does it mean to be irrevocably haunted? They’ve always been there, in glimmers, in glimpses, in dust. The shadowlands were real; they burnt an effigy of the devil in the village every summer. Family lore of ravens on the lawn, witches in the garden. My grandmother, seventh daughter of a seventh son, one green eye and one brown, taught me to read palms as a child. I cast my own cards, I trace my own lines. There’s a crack in my heart line no one has ever explained, a moment in parallel where something new and something old exist at the same time. Or perhaps it’s just nicer to believe that’s true, that it’s all mapped out; some mysterious cartography made flesh. Just a question of reading between the lines.
That winter I built a room in my mind with an old rotary phone tacked to the wall, and whenever I needed to escape I would hold the phone to my ear and listen in for the low murmur of the future. Sometimes I heard background noises from a party, the creak of floorboards and music and overlapping chatter. Other times, I heard warm laughter through thin walls. But mostly, I heard his voice. For months I dialed in, holding my heartache at bay with comforting sonic fragments of an imagined life that waited for me on the other side.
Then one day, walking in the woods, I picked up the receiver and all I heard was static. The line had gone dead. I was alone again, standing in that open clearing; pressed under the weight of an endless grey sky.
Sometimes I imagined the spaces and places and people where our looping orbits almost overlapped, stretching back into the years. How might our former selves have collided? Who might we have become to each other? I wonder if I would always have recognised you, some old instinct, some crucial kismet. Perhaps we did know each other, in another world, and all of this is just remembering.
But you cannot force someone to give up their ghosts, no matter how many ways you ask the question: can I know you? I’m knocking on the door and tapping at the window but the house is silent. I cannot stay on this stoop forever, standing still while weeds grow around me.
So leave a calling card and be on your way. Continue your own celestial loop, an orbit with no homebound gravity beyond your own fixed core. I cannot see the horizon but I can imagine another future. There’s so much peace up here, alone in the sky; I wake up bathed in light.
Lose a love, lose an ego, lose a crutch; lose your keys, lose your structure, lose your mind. Lose an hour, lose a day, lose a year. Keep going; what else? Lose a lifetime, and another. There’s still so much left. It doesn’t run out, at least not in the ways that you expect.
I stand at the open window, watching the sky shift through pink across the south of Paris. It’s a Sunday night in May and it feels like that first one, more than a decade ago, when we said let’s stay and we stayed until the end. There’s a photo of me in a box somewhere, standing half-dressed in the fountain in the square at midnight. I still have the posters we stole from the walls across the city; there’s a scratched photocopy of Beach House hanging above my bed in this little home, the most home I’ve ever known. The future’s still uncertain, but it sits on the other side of summer. Perhaps I don’t need to know how it turns out just yet. Perhaps I can miss you somewhere secret, the quietest chamber of my heart, until I don’t miss you at all.
You can rearrange me now
If we wait we can make it somehow
Well what you want, what you want
Anything you want