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(My First Haunting)

 

My earliest haunting was a liquid memory that I could never be sure had actually happened – or was really a nightmare. It was the looming maple tree whose branches hung in the air, waiting for some inspiring wind, who then spoke to me; directly to me, in a way that nobody had dared speak to me before in my young life.

 

My father’s figure was lying somewhere on the grass close to me, and I looked up from our lawn to the many trailing arms of our maple tree, exploding out of the cold interior of the earth as its roots lay dormant beneath the dew. Sleeping outside on the ground was something I could not remember us doing before.

 

Suddenly the tree spoke – and I cannot remember what it told me. I could not even hear it. I was simply aware that it was speaking to me. Our conversation elicited no physical reactions – but I knew the tree did not like me. The sudden evidence of its sentience etherized me, I did not talk back – but only listened in horror. Its roots were sliding up the frosted dirt to meet me.

 

“Margot?”

 

My neighbour. I knew it wasn’t really her, but I was so scared. I lay there for the rest of my life, listening to the tree until both of our breaths eventually expired…

 

(Ghosts)

           

            In all of our lives – ghosts will eventually find their way to us. Your first haunting occurs when enough time in your life has passed for a ghost to make its way into you.

 

            I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was fifteen. It was my father who read it to me – we sat on the couch sharing time, sharing breaths, and the realization of concepts so new to me, that lifted so many veils and revealed so many identities of the universe of which I was a part.

 

            Pirsig said that ghosts are things that contain no mass or energy of their own, and thus do not exist in the physical world. Gravity, he says, is a ghost because it has no mass or energy, and though its existence is symptomatic to our own existence on earth, the concept of gravity itself is an invention. Before it existed in our minds, it existed nowhere in the physical world. It is a ghost.

 

            Since then, I have realized all the things that really are ghosts. They can be something as simple as the memory of a person whose body is no longer shared in space, or as abstract as the feeling we get when we hear the shore pulling back through rocks on the beach, a rich and textured tonic that breathes away. They feel the warmth of your blood, and the naivety of your human brain, and they make their way to you, injecting their roots. Stopping them is not a physical matter because you can never feel them coming. But they always do, and right now millions float around at your hair and feet in some non-physical existence. They breathe on your neck…

 

(My Worst Haunting)

 

            Sometimes a possession is so bad that you come to think that it is merely an extension of yourself. Sometimes it becomes so bad that real, tangible, physical symptoms manifest. 

 

            I was also fifteen when I became convinced that I was going to die a young man – cancer was going to kill me. Pains and sensations from the twisting and burning of the inside of my body controlled me. It took me not long to be convinced that cancer was the only explanation.

 

            Each morning I had a brief moment of half-consciousness that I spent at peace, before I became haunted again. I was reminded of the spider on my back, the rock in my shoe, and the ghost marrying itself painfully with my soul.

           

            What malevolent spirit had been following me for so long that I had let it seep through my pores and guts to the center of me, where it could pull as many strings as it pleased, and replace my bones with the wood of its gnarled branches?

 

            People in my life told me that fear can show itself in your body, not just in your brain. I had always been anxious. I had always been sickly, too. Stomach pain, delusion, and the fluorescent paint of hospital rooms knew my body more than I care to admit.

 

            I did not believe in fear. I could not touch it, see it, taste it. It had no place in the physical world. Cancer was real, it hurt, and it was killing me. My epiphany on ghosts was sliding down into a deep, cold abyss, reaching its hand to mine, but I could not even see it. I was going to let it die, and give my money instead to the scientific faculties that told me that fear doesn’t hurt people – cancer hurts people. And cancer kills people, slowly, painfully.

 

(Hauntings)

 

            If ghosts have no mass or energy of their own, then their presence in our lives cannot be observed physically. A haunting does not seep its way into your home, or your old doll. A haunting seeps inside of you, into your soul – your mind.

 

            Hauntings transcend physical communication, and instead make their presence known in your own thoughts and feelings. If this haunting becomes powerful enough, the ghosts can force your own body against itself in violent outbreaks of oozing and contorting. They never have to lay a hand on you. What the ghosts can do is control you, on a level outside of your existence in the physical universe. On another side of the universe, you cannot feel.

 

            This is what a real haunting is.

 

(A Ghost Expires)

 

In time, the experiments and results of my scientific thoughts began to fail, and I drifted back to the spiritual. I sat in the forest under a large Douglas fir, and the wind through its branches told me that this had never been cancer. It had been fear, and the only cure was to accept its existence – to never reject its haunting in my life.

 

Suddenly the roots from this tree came up from the stomach of this planet to meet my hand. Sometimes it is the tongues made of wood, of waves, who tell you what you really think about this life. There is time enough in my life to move these roots.

 

And I could lift this ghost off of my body and offer it to the wind. It will always hang at my head and claw its way into the holes in my ears, but as long as I never reject the existence of ghosts, and their haunting presence in my life – I have a remedy.

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I couldn’t possibly begin to understand what she was talking about. The words dripped like water from her mouth and hit the floor – a puddle that would soon be big enough to swallow us both. She was trying to tell me that I was letting things slip away. I couldn’t remember the last time this room didn’t smell like juniper. It had followed us.

I don’t think it was that I had let things slip away, but rather, I had taken what I wanted to bury, and buried it. Deep in the fucking ground, so deep that I could not remember even a thread of its shape.

I was working – doing my job. Soon I would bury today as well, and this puddle of words at my feet would dry up. I know what I will do if this gets worse – if this body becomes no longer mine; I will do what not even this could ever make me forget.

 

And of course, it was raining tonight. It always rained on nights when she was not at home. Each drop was sent down into the ocean, its own name immediately forgotten. She looked out at the water, watching as a million little raindrops learned to love the sea.

See her look unveiled as she walks down to the water.

It was a strange mix of total distance and disassociation, but with a definite note of sadness that hung like a brick on a chain from her neck. Smooth and cold metal that leaves its mark in the skin…

Somewhere buried in space, there were three people thinking about her right now. Three names she wouldn’t be able to recall if you asked her…

And there was a moment buried somewhere in time where she was back at home. Lying on her bed, stomach to the ceiling, she apathetically pinched the strings of a guitar with her left hand. Her right hand on top the sheets, waiting for some moment of movement in the future. Her brother walked in then, a weed exploding from the floorboards. She noticed how pretty he looked.

See her face as she learns to live without her loved ones.

He saw her lying there, looking over at him. More distant a stare than yesterday, he thought… When he slept last night, he dreamt of his sister. In the dream, she had been coming home, after being away for such a long time and he saw prisms floating out of her eyes like some radiant spirits who have come to rest at ease with your soul. When they embraced the inside of his body melted…

So close now after being so far away… for so long…

See the evidence of her footsteps, trailing out into the rocks on the beach.

The shore gets pulled back through rocks and sizzles like tonic. The girl was now sitting down on some log, and her eyes looked far into her brain, she was trying to recall some memory, some old feeling that might drag her back out of this place where she was in now. Things like this had happened before, but she had never been alone.

She was listening for the words of some great ghost in the wind, but it had been long enough now. There was a rowboat on the beach, tied loosely by a rope to some other log, and she got up from her seat to move towards it.

See the way she struggles to walk in the dark.

Somewhere deep in her mind, there was another ghost screaming desperately to be remembered. Her mother whose hands were always cold as they combed themselves through her hair. Some picture buried in some pile of rubbish somewhere in space showed them together at a beach not far from where she was now. The best nights they had together were the ones where they rested in their room, listening to some record or reading the same book on the couch. Some sort of experience to bind them.

The last photographs of her mother show her not in pain for her melting body, but for the distance she was about to gain from her daughter. Space is no place to be alone, she thought, especially for her poor, sweet daughter.

This ghost screams on in her mind, but for now, will remain buried.

See the sky as it paints shadows on the bay.

The ore under the boat looked burnt in the moonlight. The trail it left down to the water was much deeper in the ground than her footsteps. She rowed it out into the bay, far enough so that nothing but water and moonlight could touch her. Looking down at the sea, the reflection of clouds sunk like spectres into some witches’ sky.

Hovering here, buried in liminal space she felt some clouded nostalgia. She knew that she had felt this way but could not recall when. This was a boat that she had maybe been in before? She cried and soaked herself in feelings that she was only trying to remember. All these shapes in her bones, bent by memories that were hiding somewhere now, and she thought that maybe they were laughing at her blindly bumping into walls in the dark. She was farther now into the dark than she had ever been before. No light or stars from the past lit her face.

“What gives” she screamed.

But there was no body around, and no answer to be found.

See the way the water never stops moving.

This last ghost was not screaming out to be found. This was the ghost that had been plucking things into the night, and burying them there, with no hopes of ever making it back to her. This ghost had felt horrible pain. She said;

Let me undo these ropes and go on living without you.

And now she was queen of the graveyard where even ghosts came to die. Out on the water, some fingers that she used to call hers submerged themselves into the sea – etherized.

Below her feet, memories that both pained and warmed her belted out;

Nadine! Nadine! Nadine!

But she didn’t listen.

She had spent so much time in the night that she had forgotten how to hear.

See how far away the surface is from the ocean floor.

Nadine sat in her boat a little while longer. The sea rested like glass below, waiting for wind. Nothing about tonight had reached her, not even the screams buried inside her cold, damp head. She knew now that she had made the right decision coming here.

Back on land, her brother stands in some garden yelling out;

Nadine! Nadine! Nadine!

But she can not hear him.

She had spent too much time in the night, and he was only learning now how to see it.

Soon he will realise that she has buried him, too.

Watch her boat disappear as it learns to love the sea…

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