Am I a Ghost?

How to explain what has happened, is happening, to me. It's as if my real life exists, and I can see it unfolding, and I'm alive in it...sort of...but I'm also observing it, as if from a great distance away. A continual out-of-body experience, every waking moment of my day. I can see myself folding laundry and doing dishes, walking the dog through the snowy landscape of Brooklyn, choosing apples in the grocery store, and Nutella on sale, and tomatoes and onions, and chicken for the soup, but all of this takes place in one realm while my mind wanders freely, intently, elsewhere.

Other lives I live, other scenes, possibilities, the characters from my book, the ones I invent, fleshed out more tangibly than the corporeal people who surround me.

Daydreaming has superseded living life, and I fear (hope?) that I'm becoming a spirit only half inhabiting my own world as my edges fade and an exchange is made: my form takes on substance in that other place, the one that exists only in my mind and on paper. Could that really be? Do people still see me, or am I truly becoming indistinct, haunting the edges of real life? The peripheries of the solid world? Am I becoming a ghost? Do they even notice that the woman at her chores and errands is fading into a blur, a smudge, a transparent wraith?

Occasionally something will bring me back: a voice. A look from Alex that pierces the eldritch mist, reminding me that I am there, that he sees me. In that moment, I exist again, outside my own mind. But it is uncomfortable; I am now better suited to the images of the half-world, where time is non-linear, where I can be and un-be on a whim, where everything outside the moment of intensity recedes into twilight.

No one can live this way indefinitely, unless they are truly mad, and I am not. So I try to pull myself out of it. It is quite painful, disappointing, like waking up from a good dream and wishing you were back there.

Ghost. Real. Ghost. A struggle.





note: I felt compelled to add, in rereading this: this post is about my overactive imagination, nothing more sinister! You all know that, right? Right?!

I know it is so wrong to post this but I can't help myself and besides I'm Jewish, right? so it doesn't really matter anyway...

My annual Krampus post.

Not that I don't want you to celebrate Christmas with great joy, if you do celebrate, and enjoy the heck out of the sweet warm smell of cookies baking and watch the little gleam in your loved one's eyes from the reflected light of your fragrant tree...and revel in the bittersweet holy music of midnight mass...and hold your children close...I mean all that, my friends

but,

the short cold days and long, cold, dark nights send me to a wrong place, where I think a little too long and hard on fetishes and bad behavior and the strange cruelties people act out on each other, sometimes in meanness and sometimes in delight--how my pain is his pleasure, and my pleasure is his pain--understand now that I mean "he" in a general sense, but I didn't need to tell you that did I?--how sometimes the joke that seems so wrong to one person is the funniest thing in the world to another--how my absolutist tendencies break down during the Solstice, to make room for dreadful imaginings that I admit to liking.

I'm only a little odd really. Whether it's swaddled and smothered and repressed in a cozy psychic sweater, or whether we take it out and examine it from time to time, the darkness is alive in us all I think.

A Little Push

Sometimes ghost stories happen in broad daylight. Apparitions appear in sunshine, their edges ruffled by a cold wind that springs from nowhere, on a city street.

It's happened a couple of times lately. This week, doing errands in the afternoon. I felt a push; a hand on my back, deliberately pushing. I stumbled, turned around. Not a soul in sight near me. No one anywhere, for half a block in each direction. Just me and the push. Not hostile, exactly, that push. But not exactly friendly either.

Then again, lying in bed, on my side, drifting sleep-wards. The hand on my back. All fingers against me, clearly palpable. And the push.

Who?

Apology: in honor of the Gothic Romance

That afternoon they had gone for a wild ride on the worn and splintery sled of his boyhood, and came as close to flying as a human body could, and when they alit again, he laughed unexpectedly, hardly recognizing the sound, for he was never one to laugh. He knew right away that she would like him a little too much for it.

He would send her away very soon.

And yes, he told himself honestly, remembering it now, he missed the physical closeness, the unrefined howling thrill of feeling, the delicious smell of it, the gripping flesh, unbinding of muscles and sinew and surge of blood and the biting, sucking, swallowing raw lust…she looked sideways at him, in the darkening room, and gave him a very odd apology; what had she to apologize for?

He didn’t answer, but disengaged himself and went to close and latch the window, for it had blown open in the storm. He stood for a long time looking with dispassion at the white fields behind the house, all the way down to the little river, winding its way through whiteness. The snow made the village into something very nearly beautiful, he thought. It did not happen often that loveliness visited here.








P.s. I've been lately enjoying a variety of Gothic tales, with rotten overly controlled and dark heroes, hence this bit of folly


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Liba

By the time I met Liba, she was no longer the girl with the huge dimpled smile and dark tangled hair. She was Great-Aunt Libby, teeny-tiny and very very old. Libby had always been a fine seamstress, and in her 90s, nearly blind, she continued to sew, though in the end her creations ran less to fine fitted garments. My sister and I treasured the collection of simple elastic-gathered little skirts she sent us in frequent batches. What she lacked in fine motor coordination and eyesight, she made up for in choice of fabric--wild, busy, bright and sometimes startling. My most favorite Aunt Libby skirt was of improbably plush faux-leopard skin. I study the clothes in these pictures now, see how stylish and whimsical she was once, and I can imagine that she knew, even in extreme old age, just what would bring delight.





No doubt about it, she was a grand girl. I notice now, too, how there is something about her expression: a passing shadow, a quality of secrecy, common to all the Pollack family; though possibly you wouldn't see it, unless you knew to look.





find more links to wonderful Sepia Saturday reminiscences here.