thoughts on ghosts

Packing up my stuff to take to Boston -- suitcase full of boots, bins with fall clothes, dividing books into stacks I'm going to take and stacks I have to leave at home due to limited space. In my room there's a blue and white dresser in the corner that has become a holding place for things I've consciously or unconsciously wanted out of sight, but will never throw away. At the bottom of the top drawer, old cassettes from middle school. Bottom drawer, shirts that my grandmother gave me before she died when I was 11.

And on top of one of the drawers, all the high school clothes -- pastel blouses with bleach and makeup stains around the collars, Prout sweatshirt, Prout tennis sweatshirt and flannel plaid shirt unwittingly stolen from my first boyfriend. And then the skirt, faded grey with threads unraveling, such a familiar weight. Sharpie scribbles all over it, multicolored, exuberant. The most heartbreaking one, of course (love you so much, viking comrade! -- meant just to be funny but it means more to me, now. If a living person can be a ghost and if a ghost can manifest in faded Sharpie scribbles -- there she is).

I think about this stuff because high school was the last time I was surrounded by people with whom I felt like I belonged so much. I don't want to go back. I think that being frozen as an eternal 17-year-old would be misery. It's just when you've been going along and then look back at all this stuff, especially the stuff that you can't ever get back because people move and change and more than that, become living ghosts to each other. And among the people who are not ghosts to each other, there are still unsaid things and regrets and I-should-have-been-there-more. I'm sorry.

It feels very strange to be leaving because I have felt things in such a ghostly way these past four years. One mysterious loss-but-not-that-kind-of-loss (love you, viking comrade) made me expect hauntings everywhere. And I still wonder why I care so much and catch a whiff of womb-dark verdant air, think of skipping stones and the bridge, and there is the ghostliness. An absent person about whom I cared so much becomes not-a-person to me; maybe a poem, maybe a thought, a notion, which all qualify as forms of haunting.

--

It's our anniversary tomorrow and he said that the surprise dinner he is taking me to is at a formal restaurant. How formal? I say. Wear a really nice dress, he says. I pull out the dress from May 2006, green satin with rustling black tulle, delicate flowers (and dried flowers upstairs on top of the dresser in the corner). It's too formal but I decide to try it on just to see. It doesn't zip all the way. Rustle, rustle.

I love him because he ties me so wonderfully to the real breathing world, the beautiful things that aren't ghostly.

--

Is there a way to be a responsible adult and still have that exuberance and optimism? I see so many friends and acquaintances becoming Busy, Jaded, Cynical, Tired. It's what I've always wanted to fight against, but I see those things in myself too. As a teenager I was an optimistic dreamer, wannabe transcendentalist, definite theist. And a quite strong believer in possibility, and maybe even more in impossibility. Those things are still there but I have to work harder for them now. A cautious dreamer, someone who approaches philosophies with an academic and analytical eye, an agnostic who wishes I could just commit to believing. Wants definite evidence before accepting a possibility. This is not who I want to be. I want to be more like who I used to be. Less naive, but no less willing to believe and dream.

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau said. I read it for the first time at fifteen and said, yes, yes, yes, they do and I never will. Many people make these resolutions to be different and to hold onto their spirits as they grow up, but few stick to them. We get all swept up in time passing and things to do and are so captivated by the ghosts that we just forget, and then one day remember, and look around and think: where am I? Who am I? When that is what we should've been fighting all along. Fighting with paper flowers and smiles for strangers and guerilla poetry sidewalk-chalked in the paths of people going about their days, not expecting any miracles. I still believe in all of that stuff, but that's the problem -- everything has gone into theory and away from practice. I think: oh maybe, if only, what if. Not: yes, will do, now. I think in ghosts instead of handshakes and footsteps and spoken words.