The ghosts were a pre-existing condition. No one likes to hear that and most never believed me but even still they’re with me. Maybe even worse than before.
Today I watched the sun drip from the sky, right into the skyline and then on into the ocean. It didn’t stop but just kept dripping. Dripped onto everything, into everything. Into me. Like watching water trace a path down a pane of glass, the sun was red, a furious shade, but the color began to drip, fall off, and it wound its way to the skyline where it turned the tops of buildings red then ran down their side into the ocean at the horizon, spreading like a ripple through the water. The waves carried it back to the shore and far out to sea until the red touched every corner of water like all the blood of the past had been collected in the sky and poured into the ocean until, to the very depths, the blood of those billions gone before covered every molecule of oceanwater. The sky didn’t turn red, though, not like here below. And, like I said, nothing was spared. I watched the sun, that big spiteful disk, turn and hover right above me on the balcony. A single line as if it were hanging down saliva from its lips the way we used to do when we were kids. I kept waiting for it to suck it back up and pull the red from the world but it didn’t. It dripped right on into my mouth. It was cold and stung like shards of glass were pouring into me or like I swallowed a gallon of bees and I felt the cold hit me in the center, here, right above the navel, and start spreading out the way it spread through the ocean. Looking out over the city, the red was moving fast, climbing over cars, running up walls, sliding down stairwells. The city stained red, a coldness coming. I could barely move my body, my hands frozen to the railing of the balcony. Watching my breath condense in front of me I remembered him. Never had I felt so alone as the last time I saw him, his body gone cold and his eyes gone vacant. I thought maybe he was coming back for me or was reaching out to me through the sun but didn’t know where I was or how to find me so he just cast himself in all directions. Maybe now that he was inside me again, that he found me, he’d collect himself, all the red, and come to me, fill me up the way he used to, maybe then I’d feel warm, but he didn’t. Or maybe it was never him. The ocean reminds me of him, though, and I know, if he finds me again, he’ll come from the ocean.
They do studies now, ways to communicate with the past, Creation Compositions. If you reach out they’ll feel you and they can find you. Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs and it’s kind of like that. After what happened earlier, I thought, maybe, yeah, I’ll try it.
It’s not that I wanted to forget but that I didn’t want to remember. Life leaves holes in you and remembering too much or dwelling too much is kind of like how kids play with a hole, accidentally filling it up or making it bigger. I never want to lose it but too much and it may be me who gets lost.
Delicate hands, alarmingly small, clutching at my dress in the dark, pawing my breasts, fingers between my legs and I was ready. I can smell you, he said, and I was already moaning but trying not to. He was vulgar sometimes like that. I hated it but, now.
He was too big for me at first but just about anyone would’ve been then. Probably thought I was much older, too. Forty years my senior but it never felt that way. Never felt wrong or out of place.
‘I’m going to hell for this.’ His hand brushed through my hair, his other cradling my chin.
‘You know how people say you’re only as old as you feel?’ The hair of his chest was grey and curly, thick. His torso covered in a pelt of down, I slept clinging to him, my head on his stomach. He liked that. ‘If you’re only as old as you feel than I’m the adult here.’
A conversation we had often. It made him laugh, his belly bubbling, his shoulders bouncing, and his head thrown back. No sound, a silent laugher, his eyes closed, the wrinkles carved deep into his face, crevices from his eyes past his cheeks falling in line with the canyons caused by his smile. My whole foot fit in his mouth. He liked that, too.
That’s not where this started, though. I was on my own when we met and had been for maybe too long. I won’t bore you with what came before. I left home when I was fifteen.
Maybe everyone died, my whole family, a big fire. It was Christmas Eve, the tree, a real one, was covered with all kinds of ornaments: tinsel, gingerbread men, three kings, sleighs, bells, misteltoes, Santas and Mrs Clauses, a few elves, all colors of lights, the big ones, bulbs that fit in your palm, not those tiny pointy ones that never really made any light. I counted the presents underneath, seven for me, seven for my sister. We wanted a dog, pleaded for one for months, but it didn’t look like we were getting one that year. Even still, it was Christmas. We were so excited and there was no way we could sleep. Mom and dad told us around midnight that we needed to get to bed. We shared a room so we lied there in the dark whispering to one another. She was eleven so Christmas was still a big deal to her, not that I had outgrown it, because I never really have, but, being older, it seemed the part I was to play, not caring as much, but, when it was just us two in the dark, I let loose. She loved that about me, my sister. She wanted to know everything about life, about sex and boys, and that’s where we shared it all, whispering our lives back and forth across the black space in our room. I think I usually fell asleep first but sometimes it was her, still mumbling questions in her sleep. That was a game, too, getting the other to talk to you through their dreams. It worked sometimes, that is, if we believed the other. Dreamtalk’s like nothing else, the things people say, a mix of reality, imaginary, an answer to your question, and words that mean so little they have to be important. I didn’t sleep that night and I guess most people in the neighborhood didn’t either, but that was my fault. Maybe it was an electrical fire or those lights on the tree just burnt it right up but the tree was definitely the start of it. Makes me glad we didn’t have a dog under there because my conscience couldn’t handle a puppy on top of everything else.
Or maybe my daddy molested me. It started back when I was young enough to think it was a game but old enough to know I was feeling something important, something beyond words and my small world at the time. At first it was just kisses in the wrong places when he was supposed to be reading me a story, my mom just across the hall with my sister. My sister slept with them until she died too young. At least she was spared the indignity. Bright side, sometimes it’s all that keeps me going. After she died, though, there was a lot more than kisses and my childsize laughter. Sometimes I’d say No, tell him it hurt, But I love you, he’d say, his face sincere and sad. Can’t I love my daughter? Being young, it doesn’t feel the way it does later. I didn’t think about it the way I think about it now, either. Mom never knew so maybe she’s not to blame but it’s not that easy. Ignorance doesn’t deserve absolution. He’d come into bed later. I played with his hair and laughed at him and how he was jealous of boys in my class. Do you like him, he’d say, Do you like him more than me? I loved him as my daddy and maybe more than that. I didn’t know. Don’t know. Inappropriate doesn’t enter a relationship from within but from without. I thought it was normal but I knew it wasn’t, that there was something different about my daddy, the way he looked at my friends and not at my mom. I got older, my body changed early, but it never slowed him down. His appetite grew but I didn’t want him as my lover anymore. I just wanted my daddy. Everyone outgrows their parents and I was no exception. It hurt him and he came into my room every night, sometimes crying, You don’t love me anymore. I held him, my hand through his hair, but I didn’t say anything, just pushed away his hands that reached everywhere. I saw him, then, for what he was, a sad despicable man. So I left.
Or maybe I never had a family, grew up in an orphanage. Maybe I killed the whole lot. It doesn’t matter which you believe or even which happened. Where the story begins is here, with me all alone riding a bus west because it’s better to run from the sun in the morning and chase it at night than the other way around.