“It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone’s presence.”
Your ghost and I get coffee once a week.
At first, we would see each other every day, always reaching for the door at the same moment. We’d exchange pleasantries, apologies, small talk, each word a penny in the wishing well, as if we could bring each other back to life by talking about the weather. I was trying to make your ghost feel better, of course. It’s not their fault they have to haunt me. But then I wonder if maybe I’m haunting them too, and I fear we have no choice but to stain the people who get close to us.
The two of us are caught in a loop. Your ghost refuses to move on, and in truth, I don’t want them to go. We cling to each other, the last two standing after a not-so-bloody fight to the death. And yet didn’t we kill each other? Didn’t we walk into ghosthood together? So why then are we still haunting each other like this? Am I your ghost too?
In time, we stopped having time for each other. Every day became every other, and eventually the two of us broke down in much the same way you and I did. Hissed remarks, half-assed excuses, cancelled plans. I thought I could get away with it, with pushing them into the background of my life just like you did to me. But then the guilt started to eat away at me. The guilt and the paranoia.
Your ghost would show up unannounced in all the wrong places. I would hear them breathing behind me at the grocery store, humming along to the songs over the loudspeaker, crawling out of the shelves when I picked up a carton of ice cream. I tried to explain that I didn’t have time to talk. I tried to explain that there was a time and a place for haunting someone, thank you very much. But that’s all a ghost knows, the haunt. It has nowhere else to go.
So, I put on a brave face and held your ghost in my arms and vowed that I would try harder to remember you. That I would hold on a little longer. I pretended like your ghost wasn’t eating me from the inside. But memory is a parasite and the longer I sat there being haunted, the more it took from me.
Your ghost slips through my fingers, smoke or sand or time, a version of you that never really existed. The worst part about the haunting is not that I see your face, it’s that the face staring back at me is all wrong. I can’t hear your laugh anymore, but I imagine it in echoes. I can’t remember the color of your eyes, but I cannot forget that you loved the color green. This ghost of you is not you, but it is fabricated from the pieces I have left of you. I stitch together all the happy memories, pretending there isn’t a gaping hole in the middle of our tapestry, hoping that I can patch things up if I remember you fondly enough. I pretend that I didn’t spend months praying for you to walk out on me. I pretend that I wasn’t the one who cut you up in the first place.
The two of us sit across from each other at the coffeeshop where you and I met. Other ghosts linger here, and I do not know any of the baristas anymore. Everywhere I go is a graveyard, and the skeletons that line up remind me of all the people I wish I had saved. But still, we choose to meet here. There is comfort in the cemetery of our youth, if only because it reminds us both of a simpler time. It belongs to both of us and neither of us, an everyman’s land that exists between the borders and boundaries that buried us. I see my feelings crowding my periphery, and I pretend that I don’t notice them. I pretend that your ghost is a solace rather than the violation it is.
You are not my first ghost. You’re not special enough to claim that title. Or rather, I’m not special enough to have avoided being haunted. The other ghosts of my life are faded now, like worn denim, and most days I forget their names. But I refuse to exorcise, just like I refuse my vegetables, and I cannot escape the fear that I will never grow up.
I have lost count of how many ghosts follow my footsteps. They no longer bother me, content to silently stalk my shadow, but I know they’re there. I cannot escape the lives I’ve lost. I cannot escape the hearts I’ve hanged. I cannot escape the butterflies I trapped, their silken wings tangled in my net like floundering fish, and I wish I wasn’t so entranced by shiny things. But then again, your spiderweb caught me much like I caught you, so is anyone really blameless here?
We keep our ghosts chained to us, tied up in our basements, skeletons in the closets, as if we will one day resurrect their memories and give them new life. But all ghosts ever do is haunt and all we ever do is remember. We are captives of memory, and the ghosts we carry are currency. The more we hold on to, the more hatred we harbor, the more love we lose. If I tell others of the people I’ve buried, the people who buried a hatchet in my back, then maybe I’ll be able to collect someone else. I don’t need any more ghosts, but I crave them like caffeine. You were just another casualty in the war, but I wonder if I could have stopped it. I wonder if I could have let you go peacefully. I wonder who we’d be if either of us had learned how to let go.
Sometimes I wonder if I am cursed. For every butterfly I have caught and kept, is there a price? Did I damn myself every time I tried to save a pair of wings?
I don’t try to be a savior, a martyr, a god. I am not God. But I am somebody’s god. I am the god of my ghosts. They pray to me, worship me, beg me to answer their texts. I’m not blameless, I’m selfish, I’m generous, I’m dangerous. The human heart starts to rust when it sees the opportunity for goodness. Is it foolish to want to save someone? Is it foolish to think we can? And yet even now, I don’t regret the creatures I tried to save. For if no good deed goes unpunished, then surely I am living in hell.
What is the difference between martyrdom and damnation? Where do we draw the line between haunting and reverie? How did I turn my memory into a prison? Did it start when I chained you to my front lawn? Or was it when I made my first ghost? How do I let go of all this folklore? How do I release the net?
It doesn’t matter how often I talk to your ghost, if I avoid them or welcome them into my home. It doesn’t matter if I pray to you, if I worship you, if I damn you. Because you still caught me in your web and I still trapped you in my net, and we will spend an eternity living with the consequences. We damned each other from the moment we made small talk and we will damn each other’s memories for as long as we live. I do not hold on to you, you cling to me. We are burrs in each other’s socks, rocks in each other’s rivers, footnotes in each other’s histories. But we are who we are because of our ghosts.
If I am damned because I wanted to hold your precious wings in my hand, then let me burn.
I’m still trying to scrub the blood off my hands. It no longer feels like a gift. Your ghost watches me in the florescent bathroom light, coffee cold and small talk stale, and we both know this blood will never wash away. The things I did to hurt you are tattooed across my brow like a brand, like a crown, like a talisman, each moment inked in blood to remind me of the horrors I’ve committed. I wonder if you and I share this link, a mutual tattoo of wrong-doing itching through our skin. Because neither of us is the hero in this story, and the devil has a long memory.
And yet, the list of wrongs is all we have left. Either of us.
We both took so much from each other, wings and dreams and plans and tears, and I fear we will always be stained. Our ghosts trade sins until they’re blue, shredding our tapestry over and over and over until it’s nothing but threads. Maybe if we sink our fangs in even deeper, the poison will release. Maybe we are meant to fight in this war forever. Maybe that’s the deal you make when you hand someone your heart.
If I hold on to the hurt, you will always be there. If you clutch my crimes in your fists, I will never truly leave you. If we force our ghosts to greet each other, we will always be friends. But we both know that’s not how it works. The sins we keep will rot like fruit when the season ends, a half-life harbinger of the fated finale. All that rotting will soon turn to ash when we burn the remains of our failure, and winter turns to spring when we let our anger thaw.
I know all this, and yet I still cannot release your ghost from my care.
This is so so good!
The filmmaker in me couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like as a short film haha.