Lilac Light

I was trained to be a ghost. My lessons were clear: breathe quietly, leave no footprints, and make no impression because I was not worth being remembered. I learned to remain silent because speaking only disrupted the din of others speaking which was absolutely unacceptable. Who was I to have a voice, anyway? Children know nothing. I collected things more beautiful than myself. Gemstones, seashells, art boxes filled with colors brighter and more vibrant than anything I could fathom as being part of the lackluster child I knew I was. I sat in corners and against walls, or in rooms with closed doors. I was invisible, even though I felt the clash of dragon’s fire and daggered ice inside my veins. I became a sorceress, casing my fragile bones in iron and gilding my skin in gold. My world was a fortress of broken crayons and hands that shooed me away, so I learned to look out my window and see mountains made of amethyst and silver instead of other children playing in the street, where I was neither invited nor allowed.

When I stepped onto my front yard the grass beneath my feet was nothing more than dead, brown barbs. I was nature’s necromancer, raising each blade into verdant resplendence with mere glances. The bowl in my hands was chipped, painted plastic, but in my memory it was fine crystal, reflecting rainbow fractals off of each facet being touched by the sun. I searched the barren yard as though it were an apothecary lush with flora waiting to be enchanted by my fervent whispers. I stole smooth, velvet petals of red and white from my neighbor’s rose bush and plucked lilac buds off the bush my grandmother hated and had tried to destroy many times because my grandfather had loved it. It never died, though. It withstood its abuse, only to bloom again and again; a relentless force of beauty. I imagined lilacs entwined through my hair and blossoming from my heart. I placed them into the bowl with tufts of the dry grass and the leaves pulled from a tree so advanced into decaying that its belly was ripped open and emptied. It sacrificed what little life it had left to aid in my godless prayers. The air around me was dry and still, so I forced myself to feel a cool breeze and imagined wind spirits tugging at my clothes, begging me to dance. And when I twirled around and cast my torn petals and dead leaves into the air, I pretended they were caught by the sky and drifted to a place where the desires of a lonely little girl would be acknowledged. But the earth was still, my wishes lay bloodless at my feet, and I was nothing but a ghost.

            I grew older, only translucent matter. I painted my walls blue and wondered if I was fated to have lips that matched them. I fled from being photographed because ghosts do not belong in the portraits of the living, and was easily lost under tables or within the wash of my blue barriers. And while I remained unseen, I saw. Landscapes through car windows morphed through speed and my influence. Power lines dissolved, buildings dismantled brick by tumbling brick, concrete and asphalt withdrew into the earth until only the trodden, abused land beneath it all flourished once more. I was privy to the glory of what no one else could see. These images were all I had, and I used them to hold myself together, unraveling them like rough strands to use as stitches and burning them like kindling to keep myself warm when my mother told me I was the cause of every hardship in our home for reasons as small as forgetting to put some dishes in the sink and as large as being seen as threatening because when doors were slammed in my face I began to slam my own harder, and because on mornings after nights where I had to pick medicated family members off the floor, I refused to pretend it hadn’t happened. When outsiders saw the hollow look in my eyes and asked what was wrong they always decided seconds later that they did not care at all.

I let the tumultuous fervor of my mind keep creating and breathing even when every other part of me shut down. It was a neon sign hanging from my ribcage advertising, “You’re still here!” I knew it was there, inside of me, and my bones would once more turn to iron. I always had my own magic. I encased it in a million glass vials and lined my invisible insides with them. No one could take away what they could not see, and I let myself be thankful that I, especially these parts of me, was so often unseen. It wasn’t until I was twenty that I realized that I didn’t want to be fragmented anymore. I opened my eyes one day, after hours split between tears and staring at blue walls, and held back on creating a ceiling of constellations over my head or lifting my hands above my stained, drab carpet to lift up thick, soft grass. Instead I saw what I didn’t want to see: piles of books I had bought with fleeting excitement but had stopped trying to read, clothes I was too afraid to wear because I was too fat or too scared I’d be mocked, homework that I had panicked over until I shoved it in a corner and stopped acknowledging it. I had stopped going to classes, too. Instead I sat in the hallways at the school for hours, doing nothing, seeing nothing, and praying no one would see me. Then I realized I had gone from being forced to be invisible to needing to be invisible.

This wasn’t what I wanted. I was a goddess of creation, but I was locked in a dark, empty cell with bars as thick as my skin should have been. I stayed there with the key so tightly pressed against my palm that my skin had begun to grow over it, but I was terrified of being free. I needed more than what I was giving myself. I wanted to dip my fingertips into the colors of Venice, smear them across the skies of London and use my eyelashes to draw color from the tulip fields of Holland to take to Ireland’s Emerald Isle. So I slowly began to tear myself up from every fucked up perception that had been needled into my skin for so long by family, and those greedy, toxic boys who hated themselves more than I ever could, and me, who knew beauty but never lived it. It still hurts and is terrifying, but my wind spirits have pulled at my skirts, begging me to yank myself away from walls and I try so hard to listen.

I am a force of nature. I am the rotted out hollows of a deep-rooted tree and I am amethyst, glowing lilac light. If I am a ghost, I am a poltergeist with power, here with purpose and demanding to be seen, not sinking into the shadows of the lives of others. There is something everyone must decide for themselves: will I let a few voices �" just a single drop in an ocean of seven billion people and the universe of entities I’ve tucked inside my being �" decide the intensity of which my own soul burns? I, for one, choose to burn like a violent solar storm on some days, the quiet flicker of a soft glowing candle on others, and however I damned well please on any other day I live. And I will live. The roses were dug up long ago. The tree was pulled from its tortured roots. All of the grass passed far beyond death and left only soil ashes in their wake. But the lilac bush still blooms.