A Prelude: On Haunting

 

A Trip to the Museum; four journal entries on past loves.

Dear reader, I must apologise for neglecting you. I have been swamped with dissertation work in my final few weeks of university. I thought I'd share with you a prelude to my next piece titled True Hauntings, Past Loves and Bad Dates; what are ghosts? which should be published next week. We will discuss the desperate and mortifying quest for human connection across death, dating apps and long-distance. This is in the context of a recent visit I made to a psychic medium and the release of a third (controversial) instalment of Sam Levinson's Euphoria.

Here are four, short excerpts from my journal-- not required reading for my next essay, of course, but they will provide the groundwork from which we can catapult ourselves into a spiral on those we've loved deeply and lost (in one way or another). These are moments of poetry and prose that I've preserved like little specimens in formaldehyde, because they will always be curious to me. I like to think of my memory as an archive or museum, you can wander along the galleries, pick out jars and examine their contents with scientific interest eternally. All of them are about boyfriend's I have come back to over and over again in this way. There's an argument to be made that they are not only vestiges, but are indeed ghostly, too.

Without further ado... enjoy!

CW: Mention of eating disorders.

July in the Foothills

2022

We are seventeen and we are steeping in everyday magic; like tea-leaves in hot water, the more we soak into each other, the stronger we become. Honey-heat is packed thickly between bookshelves. They line the four walls of your living room and I use East of Eden to fan myself dry when sweat beads at my temples. We are seventeen and we make lovely music; sing with laughter, clarion-call, drum out badinage. Harp-strings of hair escape the knot on my head and you play with them gingerly. My bare, slick shoulder slides against the cotton cuff of your surf-shirt. If I had worn my heart on my sleeve then, we would've crushed it between us like a damson-fruit.

But we are seventeen! We are sitting on your sofa, the cusp of adulthood, with legs wildly swinging, socked feet dangling over the edge. We have time. We spend it watching TV instead, the lights of Tenet flicker across our freckled faces and colour us cupid. It's your favourite film. You want to share it with me for I've never seen it. You want to share spacetime, isn't that marvellous? You want the fabric of my being to stretch thin and shade you like a parasol, or perhaps a washing line, in this kiln that is July. You want me to knit you warm at night in a twin bed with the window flung open into the valley. I want that, too. But we are seventeen and one is always too afraid to tell the other.

Time, of course, has thinned us out. We have filled out other cups and other lives and we are not together but I will always love you like a spoonful of sugar; tooth-rotting sweet and just a pinch too much for my own good. I like to pull that memory out in ribbons --sundress, broken book-spine, hair in curlicues-- and it ties neatly around my throat; a little, pink bow. And it ties me to you, "a string knotted under my ribcage" (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre). And it reminds me that we were seventeen and we didn't touch much. Though we've seen many more movies now, and I know you taste of saltwater and touch like birch-bark, still we have never been so intimate as we were at seventeen, way back when we shared spacetime and everyday magic.

-- The foothills in question, taken the same day I wrote the aforementioned passage.

A Fox in the Henhouse

2022

We filed into the Main Hall lugging the deadweight of folders and homework on one handbagged shoulder. Rubber soles squealed against lacquered floorboards (a relic of the sixties), spearmint gum and lipgloss smacking between our pearly teeth, Beethoven's sixth plucked on ivory keys. There's the ghostly perfume of rolled cigarettes (chainsmoked in an alleyway before the bell rang) still lingering on my fingertips and the chalky scent of body mist fogged onto powdered faces-- sweet as tuck-shop confection. Everything smells warm and dusty and girlish as milky morning sunlight filters through the prefab windows, dripping puddles at our loafered feet. 

I seat myself in a blue acrylic chair towards the front, stage-left. And those powdered faces angle their pointed chins toward the lectern above as you materialise from behind the velvet curtain-- the phantom of our female opera. My classmate perched on the piano bench stills her deft, polished fingers when you clear your throat and welcome us into assembly. Here you are, presented with a rapt audience of three hundred grammar-school girls in our rolled skirts and drop earrings and your eyes snag on me like a loose thread at the cuff of your school-jumper sleeve.

We had all been fenced away from boys for six years by then, so, round, glassy eyes, deep as dish plates, turn themselves on you. Boys were an endangered species-- elusive, fleeting, foreign. After all, it's not often broad shoulders veneered in pink Oxford shirts paraded across the lane, a no-man's land, from their muddy schoolyard to fill out the swept, narrow halls of our domain. Anorexics dressed up in mink lashes, laced socks and leather totes were as common as the garden sparrow here, but you? You with your rough, bitten fingers and ruddy cheeks (yet to be chiselled by the stonemason of time, to lose the rosy roundness of boyhood) may as well have been a delicious fiction we all dreamed up together; rugged and rare enough to make anyone ravenous. They could boggle and stare, bat those spidery eyelashes caked with Better than Sex, and part their plush, rosebud lips all they wished-- but you were very real to me. 

I knew which titles lined your bedroom bookshelves. I knew the weight of your head in my lap as I scrubbed lazy circles against your scalp, singed my boney fingers on your kitchen AGA, secretly winked at your little sister across the dining table in waning summer until she belly-laughed, shaking her little heart-shaped head of white ringlets. I chased your spaniel through sheep fields and bruised my knees plum-purple tackling you at the weekends. I knew the colour of blackberry crumble staining your mouth wine-red, granulated sugar sticking to your fingertips as you smeared them childishly across my freckled cheeks. 

You pursed your lips and bit back boyish laughter when girlfriends elbowed me in soft, meaty ribs beneath the scalloped cardigan I favoured. They teased me silently, mirthlessly beneath the stern watch of our tutors when you began to speak; head boy of a strange and distant land, so secure in your place at the front. I don't remember what you said, now. Only that the room leaned in hungrily towards you, and you, impossibly, leaning back. Toward only me.

Seaglass

2023

There are few memories that are kept not in the back of my mind but are tucked gently into my heart, like a pocket square. 

Perhaps the most golden is this; we are on the island beach and it is August. 

I have never known love that isn’t sharp, but your hand is soft in my palm and your fingers leave mine only to pick up a pebble of sea glass, caught in the moonlight like us.

It is weathered and worn but where it was once broken, sharp and unwanted, it has been made beautiful again, rocked in the cradle of an ocean far away. 

When you offer it to me, I can’t help but draw some comparison. I have been splintered too, 

and yet you have softened me. Perhaps time does not heal broken things, perhaps it only makes them new.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2026

I dreamt of you again last night. Why is it that you are tucked into the folds of my mind like a pressed flower between pages? I had my head rested in the sandy hollow of someone else's shoulder, there in the garden. He smells like damp tobacco and my own cheap, chalky perfume rubbed into the animal-warmth of his skin. And though I know I love him in this sertraline dreamscape, my heartbeat still flutters at the pulse point in my wish-bone wrists; frantic as a rabbit's twisting in the wire of its trap. I am beginning to feel the pinching teeth, beginning to panic when you appear from beneath the boughs of a crab-apple tree. It's snowing blossom; pale petals collect in the pleats of your russet hair. We three strangers bathe like nymphs in the milky May moonlight, regarding each other with deep, velvety eyes and snide competition.

Can you hear it? Can you hear my heart pealing with all the joy of wedding bells in all four of its sacred chambers? Here we are, all in white. Flowers burst open from their little, green buds and we have a witness. No matter that his hand is on my thigh and his breath is wetting the peach-fuzz at the base of my neck, beading like morning-dew on the lawn; pearly grass and clover. No matter, because you are here, waiting for me. I am tangled in my own snare, not of string wire, but of both wanting and waking. 

Let me know your thoughts, and do tell if you have any ghost stories of your own!

Works cited:

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Christopher Nolan, Tenet

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Sam Levinson, Euphoria