Sitting (on the very very rare) train to Manhattan from Brooklyn I look up from my phone and think, the surest way to get revenge on someone is to be doing what they want to do, and better. Or, if you do it worse - to give no fucks.
At this point in my life, “everyone hates me” has become my annoyingly familiar (and admittedly inaccurate) refrain. Truly, I feel as if my allies have abandoned me and jumped ship, if ever they existed.
What I have instead, are friends. Friends are good, better even. But friends won’t help me pull a fast one on those very specific people whose apathy regarding my existence I can’t stand. There’s maybe no worse feeling than being left to kick the dust, all alone, tending to some rivalry that never really existed, but that you continue to animate, unhindered.
The first time I ever felt a ghost and realized it was in Puerto Rico. My boyfriend’s parents paid for both of us to come to his cousin’s wedding, which was so deeply kind of them. The ghost wasn’t a secret; we were staying in his grandmother’s house and it was considered to be haunted, as she had passed some years prior. Doors would open by themselves there, without a draft, yellow light falling across the carpet. The ghost felt like being wrapped in a warm cocoon — slightly muffled, but safe. Like something moving through the air towards and around you. I wondered what his grandmother had thought of us, of me.
My first night there I couldn’t really sleep and read a part of a book I had brought with me until I grew tired enough. The book was a memoir and in it the author briefly mentioned loving ghosts. I felt an affinity with her then, for it seemed auspicious that I was reading about ghosts as I was, for the first time ever, consciously spending time with one as well. I felt strongly that I should email her and relay this experience but never did.
I wonder about the notion of celebrity and the notion of being a public “figure”. People will gravitate towards you because of something very specific you’ve revealed about yourself, usually through your work. Meanwhile, you don’t know them. In what other areas of our lives does this dynamic replicate itself? Surely, ghosts are the unseen watchers of humanity.
In a less literal sense, my ghosts are former friends and lovers, people I remember so deeply their imprint is still etched into some part of me, and they may or may not feel the same. My ex once said, long ago, “I don’t even remember who we were.” I had caught them off guard by expressing my desire to get back together. With my ex there has been plenty of closure, I think we both know we aren’t compatible or “good” in a relationship, but the idea of being the only one who remembers our love story makes me feel so lonely. It’s a ghost I don’t think of often, as not only is who we were together long gone, so is who I was through all those memories, and even later, right up to now.
My own ghost lingers and laughs at me. “Why are you still here? Who are you trying to fight?”
I don’t think I know anymore.