ghost or haunted
by Jen Rouse
When the paint finally gave way around the bolt, there was no time to catch the iron bed rail before it met the ridge of the back of my skull. The soft early morning light fizzed around my eyes, as I stumbled to the back of the cabin to vomit. But there was a moving truck waiting and a deadline. Dead. Lines. A layered and electric web built to capture prey between worlds. Because what else are we if not playthings in an elaborate game of where-in-the-fuck-am-I-and-why? For the next month, I would forget where I was going. I wouldn’t be able to look into the sun. I would end up in the ER, having ignored my brain, as is so often the case. But there was a truck. And it was all ending. Again.
I am not sure most days if I am ghost or haunted. I turn a corner in my house and fall inside a small room from my childhood summer home that smells of my grandmother’s Shalimar and talcum powder, staring at her reflection in the antique pink mirror above the soft wave of the chest of drawers beneath. She can’t speak here. And I cannot touch her. In the middle of a keynote address at a local college, all of my technology dies, and I hear myself reading not to my audience, but to her, the poems I wrote about us, suspending and stringing out our summers like hummingbirds midair. We are on the front porch, playing cribbage—cards clipping along, the gentle rustle of rain warm in cedar fingers. Is it you? Am I here? And the nights when I wake with a start, like a fist punching a hole through my chest and into the mattress, tears mercilessly sliding down the sides of my face, I wonder if I’ve screamed the silent no, the silent wait, the silent don’t go. They’ve destroyed the cabin now. And she is perhaps worn down to petrified skin and slightly brittle bone. Her casket was carved with roses, lined in pink silk. I never saw her face in death. I walk the banks of the shore, and I wait. Ghost. Haunted.
There is no age at which we are unable to feel grief. No time limit on how long it might last. We are always looking for ways to belong, to feel safe. To be held and wanted. We make up arbitrary rules about how we should navigate the universe of need. But there are no rules. The late August night before my sister and I finished moving the final pieces from my grandparents’ cabin, we waded out into the lake to feel the soft sand beach under our toes one more time. My grandfather spent most of his life shoring up the bank with rock, raking the weeds and crayfish skeletons out of our swimming area, and gutting the day’s catch on the dock. Impossible not to see him there, thin and muscled like a featherweight boxer, like the baseball catcher he’d been. A little old-movie-star quality about him, a little Bing Crosby meets James Martin. He was the man whose arms opened so readily anytime my tiny sister bulldozed her way to him, her blond bob his favorite, her shy smile, her playful laughter.
I choose to find the smallest lake shells, coiled into themselves like the pin curls my grandmother would patiently make with my waist-long hair. When I bend to the water, I feel like I am her. Her manicured fingers dipping below the surface. Her sturdy frame setting with the sun. If you have ever felt the perfect presence of being in a memory, maybe you understand the thin filament that separates the living and the dead. Maybe this is the beauty of grief and how it extends—like a fishing line cast and reeled in, cast and reeled in. Eternity, a fish glistening in the sun. Just something there hovering.
Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Pithead Chapel, Cleaver, Always Crashing, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Headmistress Press has published her books Acid and Tender, CAKE, and Riding with Anne Sexton. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.