The ghosts, though. Those’ve always been with me. Talking to shadows, playing with phantoms, that’s what matters about my childhood. It wasn’t that I was imaginative or anything like that. They were with me, really. Not an imaginary friend but a real one, a long dead one that came back to where she grew up only to find another little girl that knew she was there. The ghosts, they told me secrets about their lives, the things they were too afraid or too ashamed to let be known in their living life.
Delilah came to me often. Born blind, she preferred being a ghost.
I can see everything now, she said, Even the things no one else can.
She never told me what those unseeable things were that she was watching but that image sticks with me.
She died when she was barely three, drown in the bathtub. At least that’s what she told me. Her ghost looked older than that but she said ghosts could look like anything they wanted to because ghosts can’t be seen by the living.
‘I’m alive.’
You just think you’re alive, she said.
After that, I avoided Delilah. Not so much because she scared me but because she was a liar.
Mrs Dolier was my favorite ghost. She was lost and trying to find her way back home.
I know he misses me, she said. Her husband was still alive, or at least she believed he was. She hadn’t seen him in ages and, she said, If he was dead then we’d be together by now. I didn’t think death worked like that but I was just a girl then with kneescrapes and dirty hair. She was from Delaware but I didn’t know where that was. I showed her maps but she said the world of the dead doesn’t look like maps and charts. It looks like caves and meadows, lights and darks, cold and warms, assonance and dissonance.
‘How’d you get so lost?’
I don’t know, dear, she said, Nothing looks the same once you die.
I always thought she was afraid of her past. Being dead suited her. She was kind.
Ghosts are hard to explain. None are the same and I can’t really see them. Not with eyes. But I know where they are. Taste them, even, in the air.
Every star is tied to a person. There’re so many because each one is for a newly dead person. Their life slips from their body, binds to the birth of a star, and watches over everything. Shooting stars, no one’s been able to explain that to me. Same with supernovas or blackholes but those must mean something. If ghosts can die they don’t like to talk about it. Rooms darken when I bring it up, how one stops being a ghost. Sensitive area, I guess.
I watch the sky often, even when it’s not dripping into the earth. I search for his star because I should recognize it. Something about its glow or its place amongst the others should make him appear to me. I draw him in the sky with my eyes instead hoping that one of the many dots I connect will be his and will maybe, I don’t know, glitter extra bright to let me know he still thinks about me and is looking for me.
Ghosts are like people, both good and bad, angry and sad, confused and crazy. Something about dying turns them, makes them, I don’t know, malevolent. Sometimes it’s just the way they lie or the things they don’t tell you. But some of them, the ones who’ve been dead too long, spent too much time away from the living, they grow jealous, angry with those who are alive and, well, everyone’s heard of hauntings and all that.
That’s another reason I went west. Ghosts, for some reason, are always heading east.
When I close my eyes he’s here with me. In my bed, wrapped around me, he massages my breasts and kisses my neck. He smells like damp basement, musk and mold, the sweetness of his house, of all those dying books, of all the rotting carpets, and I can’t open my eyes. He explored me with his tongue and his hands memorizing every inch, tasting every orifice, every sweatgland.
I’m his and always have been, even before I knew him, from the first time I laid eyes on his work, when I finally saw him drinking coffee by himself, unnoticed, alone, his face long and puffy. He was the walking dead, swollen red nose, dark heavy bagged eyes, white hair that somehow kept its lustre. He adjusted his glasses, wiped off the fog caused by steam, and drank such small sips, afraid to burn his tongue. He was sensitive of his tongue, always.
‘It’s my greatest organ,’ his yellow toothed smile that stretched from sunrise to sunset. It really was.
‘I have not smiled like this in years, my dear,’ he said after the first time, ‘I was afraid I’d forgotten how.’