ghosts

I have been left out, thawing, melting, my insides spilling out again. I’m being kinder to them, to myself, this time around. The pain becomes hard to contend with when it morphs finally into its true shape, the grief any of us carry around our whole lives, before or after that person. It feels almost built in. When I see children and babies, the glimmer of innocence in their eyes, I am always so struck by it - the love they have for being alive has not yet metamorphosed into the grief for realizing what it all costs.

The other day I was talking to this kid sitting at the barstools at my work while his grandpa was playing the piano. He was teaching me about the PA system and the different knobs’ functions. He’s probably about seven or eight. There is something so healing about talking to kids, being relieved of one’s adult filter, finding joy and play in the small things. He couldn’t remember the word for ‘reverb’ or ‘echo’, so when he got to that knob, he said - “it’s the one where if you say ‘hello!’, it goes ‘hello, hello, hello, hello’,” getting smaller each time.

There is some throughline between that joy, that lack of emotional clutter and context, through grief and heartbreak, through my dreams last night where a ghost kept entering my body, in bed in my dreamscape, pinning me down. And in it, I remembered someone from my waking world telling me that you have to tell the ghosts to leave, that they’re not welcome. So in my dream, I tried to shake the fear from my voice and say as sternly as I could possibly muster, “you have to leave, I command you. Leave me alone.” It happened several times, but each time I got a little braver and a little more certain. And it began to leave, sooner and sooner.

I would like to be free of my ghosts, more than anything, just as anyone else. I chase them out, I tend to them, with music, with writing as I am now, with nourishment of the soul and body, with the passage of time. It heals all wounds, I know. I have to believe.

I do it in my pink silk pajamas I wear just for me, I do it with candles lit and with all the care I can muster. Ghosts need tenderness too. I remember the man who said to me that to not smoke a cigarette is kind to yourself - he’s right. I think about it every time I’m trying to decide if I really need one, right now. I take myself to all the fantasies I keep as safe havens in my consciousness, the landscapes of California, rolling hills, a rest stop right in between the Bay and LA. For some reason that one’s always been there, in the temple of my mind.

Perhaps because when I was young it was always on the way to visit my grandma, it was exciting. I remember she will no longer be there when I go down south. It’s okay. I hold the aching in my chest. Ghosts cannot pin me down, cannot paralyze me. I find comfort in the small things, in the sunshine, in the rain; in the moments of losing spatial awareness, becoming mesmerized by the rhythm of the way the rain joins a certain puddle, accompanied by songs special to me. California holds me, and I thank god I was born on the West Coast. ‘Hold me forever,’ I think. There is nothing else like this, but everyone has their own. Their own home that holds their heart, I mean. I am so fortunate, and I wish everyone this same luxury. To hold home like this, in reciprocation, to bear these fruits. My aching is not forever, it reminds me. It will leave and then return, time and time again.