Everybody has a ghost
Who sings like you do
Yours is not like mine
--Live, "Ghost"
There are so many ghosts. I saw one once, and by that I mean I saw one taking a vaguely physical form in front of me. It was a curious story involving an old house I used to live in. I died in that house, and apparently so did she. I came back mostly whole. She did not, but she never managed to leave until I asked her to. It was one of the weirder moments of my life.
I had lived in the house for several months prior to taking my own life in that house. My first roommate and I had a number of encounters with something odd. It always involved the staircase leading from the first to the second floor. There would be footsteps. There would be creaking, especially of the banister, and there would be voices. We called it the ghost.
The night of my death I saw the ghost on the staircase. She looked scared out of her wits, wearing a long white nightgown and scowling frightfully at me. I remember being very calm as I told her, "You need to go, this is my house now." She was never heard from again.
I think I was a ghost myself when I told her that, although I'm not sure. It is a long, confusing story I've told before.
I've seen some other ghosts since then, but they've been of a different kind. The night of his death, my good friend Dave appeared beside my bed. He had been sick for a long time, but I didn't receive the call telling me he had passed on until the next day.
There was also the appearance of Christina the day of her funeral. She appeared in a vision to me as I sat in the church during the funeral, running through a field of purple flowers and laughing. Her best friend Erin, who delivered the eulogy, had the same vision just prior to going up to speak on behalf of the woman we both loved. We didn't know about having had the same vision until a few days later when we ran into each other on a day the sky turned to gold.
Most of the ghosts I see, however, come in dreams.
I used to communicate very well with these "spirits" as they appeared to me. They often had valuable information that would propel me further on my journey in life. I used to feel quite at home with them, comfortable as one might be when a good friend comes over to share stories.
These days the ghosts mostly leave me unsettled. I'm uncertain of how to communicate with them and they leave me jumpy and shaken. I don't think the ghosts bear me any more ill will than they used to, I've just forgotten how to get back to where I once belonged. I'm struggling so much to keep my head above water in the temporal world that I've lost sight of my old horizons.
Where did I go wrong?
I never needed this before
I need a woman to help me feel...
In the summer of 1995 I was fighting against the tides that had come upon me. I was resisting an overpowering sensation that I was in the wrong place and that I needed to listen to my dreams in order to find the path I was meant to take in life. It was a battle within that would go on for almost two more years, but at the time I finally met someone who made sense within both of the worlds I was living in at the time.
Her name was Chris and she was a suicide. We spent a good amount of time together during a period where I was trying to date as many women as possible, since I was at the time convinced this would cure what ailed me. Since I blamed my failed relationships and problems with women for my suicide, there was a weird logic in dating every woman I met to make up for it.
Chris would convince me that I had nothing to make up for and that I had to stop thinking I needed to avenge myself. She would do many things, and being the beautiful person she was, she could not help but do the things she did for me. And although she would go on endlessly about how she had no romantic interest in me, her eyes usually told a different story, and when she disappeared, she sent me a letter. One of the things she said in the letter was, "And now I will become a ghost. Then you will love me forever."
And she did disappear. Her apartment was empty when I drove out to see her and the landlord said she had no forwarding address. The strange old woman she rented from also managed to tell me, "I think she was a witch, anyway." If she was, she was a good one.
She dared me to listen to the ghosts. My personal accountants know she was the first of the Christines. She was more right about becoming a ghost than she knew.
There have been many ghosts in the years since Chris became a spirit that lives on in my imagination, and I do not doubt I also live on in hers. She convinced me I was not alone. One night she rolled up her sleeves and showed me the deep scars on her wrists. She asked me to tell her "my story" without my having spoken of anything having to do with suicide before that night. She opened the floodgates and for a period of time that exists now only in eternity, two crazy people became completely sane by existing for that time only in each other's worlds.
Angels fall like rain.
The majority is always sane. It is the only way to measure sanity; it is the only way to define sanity. When two people with the same insanity are together without anyone else to intervene and judge they become sane. This is the foundation of love.
Inside you
The time moves
And she don't fade
The ghost in you
She don't fade
Inside you
The time moves
And she don't fade
A race is on, I'm on your side and
Here in you my engines die I'm
In a mood for you
Or running away
The Psychedelic Furs,
"The Ghost in You"
These days the ghosts seem darker and more in pain, or maybe it is my own perception being tainted by my life's recent events. It is hard to tell.
My latest ghost "lives" in a subway tunnel. He seems quite certain it is a good idea to sit on the subway tracks, sort of in the fetal position wearing a dark trench coat and hiding his face from me. And yet he seems to want me to protect him from the oncoming train.
Dude, this is a lot to ask. I'm just saying.
He has confirmed he is already dead, which makes needing me to protect him from the oncoming subway train somewhat ridiculous, but spirits work on a strange plane that we would be hard pressed to understand. They deal mostly in the symbolism of acts rather than the actual physical definition of them, since, well, they aren't physical really.
The train comes. I try to wave it off. This is also ridiculous. The train is on tracks. It cannot turn away from those tracks. It can only stop, if it can even do that, and I never try to stop it until right before it hits me, which is usually when I wake up.
He wants me to look after someone. A woman. A living woman he has a strong attachment to. It upsets him to ask this of me, but he keeps asking me, night after night to do just this. He usually breaks down while asking me.
He is a restless spirit but he is not an angry ghost. He has too much self-loathing to be angry with anyone or anything other than himself. And he shakes me to my foundations and robs me of my sleep when he repeats the same statement he has several times in asking me to look after this woman for him...
"You're the only one I can trust not to try to fuck her, but you will."
He will not be ignored. The ghosts are hungry and I am called to their service. I will accept his request and I will honor it as best I can.
Where did I go wrong?
I never needed this before
I need a woman to help me feel...
For you, who knows who you are.