Ghost

It speaks for itself.

It's ten years down the road, and I'm a different woman-

the type to put magnets on the refrigerator.

The type that pays for a Sam's Club membership just so I can buy paper towels in bulk.

There is a cross sticker in the back windshield of the family car,

and we never talk about depression,

or my mother.

I have a husband with a degree,

a little girl,

a little boy,

and a Golden Retriever.

And maybe on the inside, I still struggle.

But there are far too many distractions for me to get lost inside my head like I once did.

If I still wrote...

well,

I'd have nothing to write about, besides the cooking channel,

or where we're taking the kids for Easter holiday.

But if one day, my little boy comes into the living room,

six years old with eyes wide as saucers and his daddy's honest frown,

and asks me,

“Mommy, are ghosts real?”

I'm going to take a step back.

I'm going to let myself miss it,

for just a moment.

I'm going to taste the Evan Williams on your tongue,

smooth and bitter, right down to the after-bite,

just like our love.

And I'm going to ignore the fact that, even after all this time,

I still can't see a bottle of that whiskey on the shelf without forgetting my own name.

I'm going to let the memories wash over me,

bittersweet, still, after all those years,

yet not quite so painful anymore...

How every night felt like the weekend-

bonfires and liquor and road-trips at 3 am.

Every kiss felt like eternity,

and your mouth was always smiling, when it reached for mine.

There was darkness, yes...

fists through the drywall,

violence and tears and drunken bitterness, with no real foundation.

But how much easier it is,

to recall the way the sun was always drawn to the darkness in your eyes,

how you exuded confidence and liberation like a haughty stone sovereign...

how the voices in your head always seemed to be calling my name.

But most of all,

I will remember myself.

Just a child,

nearly as naive as the one standing before me, a decade into my future.

Open-mouthed.

Smiling.

Butterfly-fluttered and cheek-flushed, with an infatuation I could never quite explain,

never tame,

never resist,

when it came to you.

Excitable and unbroken and trusting,

a prairie flower un-bruised by time or climate-

believing in a man that did not exist in our world.

When you left,

when that world burned, and I was the last log thrown into the furnace to be swallowed up in smoke and embers,

that bright-eyed wild-child of a girl drew her final breath.

The pile of ashes that was left in the aftermath is who I am now,

a solemn-eyed mother,

struggling to explain to a startled little boy,

that ghosts aren't always the re-run memory of the deceased.

Some people just keep on living,

carrying a ghost around in the quiet corners of their mouth where no one thinks to listen...

where even the dentist never thinks to look.

Life is slow.

Life is quiet.

The crawl of a snail on the front porch-

the glistening trail is leaves behind goes unnoticed.

I don't cry in the shower anymore.

If there are days when the darkness touches my skin,

I turn on every light in the house and I clean the cobwebs out of the corners.

I cook dinners that are perfect-

evenly-measured portions that don't touch one another on the endless bright white of the china plates in the dining room.

There are no SOLO cups.

There are no hand-me-down dishes stacked in the cabinets.

The furniture in our living room matches the carpet,

and there are pictures hanging on the walls.

Some days,

I feel quite at home.

But when my daughter approaches me,

at sixteen,

and tells me she's in love with the preacher's son-

the one with tattoos and fire in his eyes,

it will take every ounce of my self-control not to grab her by the petal-soft skin of her forearm

and run.

I do not need a name.

I do not need to see his face,

to know what he is.

Everything I need to know is shining, like the needle end of a dirty syringe in her voice.

I know,

as she will someday know,

that a thousand miles away from the existence of such a boy is the only safe place for her.

But instead,

I will speak to her calmly.

My own voice will never tremble.

She will never suspect that I once stood in her shoes,

shoes too clean for my own liking...

laces just begging to be untied.

I will see, in her sweet face,

the girl I once was"

hungry for the thrill of love and disaster.

I will know it is a hopeless cause, to hold her back.

But I will try...

I will try oh so hard, to teach her what I have learned.

She will feel feverish to the touch, when I take her hand.

Already miles away,

sitting shotgun, while a boy with a head full of demons plays songs she doesn't understand,

not quite yet.

I will catch her, as she is walking away.

I will tell her what I wish someone had told me.

Baby girl,

don't let him wrap his fingers around your heart.

What starts off so warm will quickly become the frenzy of a rabbit caught in the grasp of a sociopath.

I know you want to love him.

I know you think your love can heal him.

But he is a runaway train,

and you are an angel just dancing on the railroad tracks.

And I will look at her,

really study her,

for the first time in a long time.

I'll know just how easily her green eyes could have been brown,

your brown,

dark as oil spills when the anger and the liquor turn to devil's-bane behind your skin.

Darker than the blood I bled, when I lost our child and couldn't find the words to tell you,

even though I spent the next week,

counting months in my head.

A child that should have been born that August-

should have been the preface to that deep, sticky Indian summer,

when the sun was hot enough to boil blood.

A child that would have been a Leo...

like my mother.

And I will know then why it was lost.

I will remind myself that this girl, a child still, at sixteen,

is a Libra-

she is steady and sweet,

balanced as the scales of her zodiac sign.

And I know exactly how she feels.

I, too, was young and free-

seventeen,

in love with an older boy.

I thought I was home, in arms that were sandpaper walls-

harmless, until I tried to move,

and then full of friction and abrasion.

There are no words in a mother's vocabulary that can stop her,

this I know.

But god, I will try.

Stay in school,

I will plead.

Don't let your love make you blind.

And when he touches other girls,

when he lies to you, with eyes too dark to be heaven-sent...

when he makes you feel small,

remember this:

your eyes-

the same green as the eyes of the cat your mother became, when she learned this very same lesson-

are more beautiful than the entire span of his life.

Your mind is a paradise.

It does not always have to be sweet,

or gentle,

or mild-manner,

or polite.

He will never find that in another girl.

But if he wants to try,

then hold your chin up and flutter your eyelashes like a hummingbird's wings and let him.

And when she will not meet my gaze,

when she is still full of breathless smiles and stammers,

I will search my quiet heart for a warning that will never land on her young, naive conscience.

I will find the echo of his name, trapped in the spaces between the fingers of her clenched fists.

I will tell her the truth,

brutal and painful like a new flesh wound.

I will not offer her a bandage.

I just don't want your mouth to be full of other boys' names-

names you don't want to remember,

names you will never cherish,

because you can't stop tasting the bitter memory of his.

Loving him won't be pretty,

but months after he's gone, you'll still find the beauty in his disease.

You will count the number of ways he touched your soul before he broke your heart,

and you will never be the same.

Your ribs will ache when you breathe.

Your spine will bow like a sapling in a hurricane.

Those Libra scales,

so steady on their track,

will be skewed forever after.

You are so young and impressionable.

You've never sobbed in the shower until your mouth is bloody.

You've never had to walk a tightrope between love and hatred,

until your feet are bruised and aching.

You've never known the curse of a broken heart.

And someone like me can taste the promise of one, from a mile away.

But when I see her, stumbling in after curfew,

cheeks flushed with love and alcohol,

I won't have the heart to do more than wrap her up,

love her the way my mother never could.

The ghost under my skin will claw at the walls,

force her way between my teeth,

just to get tangled up in the scent of some lost boy's breath in my daughter's hair.

Life is endless.

It is all we know.

There comes a time when an individual has to hide the creases in their past,

smooth the oriental rugs in the foyer until the wrinkles are a memory long-forgotten.

I get my nails down by a Korean woman in town,

twice a month.

Only when that old familiar darkness creeps back across my eyes do I hide in the bathroom and bite my perfectly-manicured fingernails.

I remember a time when they were always bitten to he quick,

bloody and raw,

suffering like the girl that became a ghost.

But that doesn't happen often.

Often,

I leave dog-eared books on the coffee table,

and get lost in antique shops all by myself,

the way I once did,

with the wrong man.

And when my husband gets home from work, he'll ask how I'm feeling.

And he'll mean it.

He'll hang his coat in the closet,

and I know I'll never have to wrap it around myself to remember the smell of his skin, when he's gone.

He'll kiss me and tell me he loves me...

he'll be the first and only one after you to say it and not make me run.

Unlike before, I will never have to fight for this man's love.

I will not need to compete.

He will be steadier than the hands of a grandfather clock,

and just as routine.

But he'll never see me,

as I was then...

Wild.

Free.

Unbroken and unfenced.

And maybe that's a good thing.

Grown men don't settle down with storm clouds.

They don't love wild-eyed witch girls.

And maybe you never did, either.

But he's never heard your name.

He's never held my hair while I rail cocaine off of hotel room tables-

lines whiter than snow,

whiter than piano ivory,

whiter than death.

He's never slipped his hands between my legs in a crowded room,

watched the reacting floodlights in my eyes set the world on fire.

He's never seen me,

eyes red-rimmed, stumbling from bourbon and my own sadness.

He's never called me baby-doll,

watched the word run ripples across my skin like a love letter in Braille.

He's never kissed blood off of my scars,

nor tasted the promise of a suicide off my tongue.

He has never made me cry.

And he never will.

He'll never know about you at all.

Unless one day,

he stumbles across a poem I wrote,

about a boy I could never love enough to keep.

He might pick up a notebook that I've had,

tucked away in a corner of my mind

the way I had it tucked away in the corner of a closet no one ever really uses.

He might read the date,

take in the shaky scribble.

He might wonder,

might even ask about you.

It will feel so casual,

to lie to him about what you were.

In my voice that never stumbles like I once did every time I tried to walk with my arm in yours,

I will make you sound so small.

Just a boy.

Just a boy I thought I could live with and love forever.

Just a boy,

when I was just a girl.

Not quite adults, but we tried.

And maybe he will smile affectionately at the idea of his adolescent, moonstruck wife.

And he'll kiss me on the forehead,

never knowing that you did the same thing-

that once upon a time, that was all it took to make me dizzy with dreams and elation.

And he'll never know that the woman he loves has a ghost inside of her-

not the kind that goes bump in the night.

No,

just a ghost with a girl's face,

almost familiar, if you squint your eyes hard enough...

who still whispers about a boy,

whose name she hasn't spoken

since that spirit had a pulse.

Author's Note

This piece is pretty personal, so I don't know if a lot of people will feel it on the same level as myself. But it's important to me.