ghosts

I think we all need to get away from where we’ve been.

Where I grew up the sky was too big, and eventually it all started feeling washed out, anemic, like at any moment the ground would shrug me off into the blue. And the other place, it was sort of like that too but more in a purple-eyed pedantic way, where I found myself walking the same route again and again and staring into people’s faces and not seeing them at all.

All those moments you were low and gray, they stick around. Your own ghost haunts the streets, passes through you and gives you the lead lung. Grasp, grasp, you grasp for meaning and love and it all slips away and then you’re driving too fast at night because you can’t feel the road disappear under the wheels.

And I can’t even imagine the Illinois blues, the can’t-flee-the-suburbs shakes, the part where you’re still there after years and years and you don’t know how it happened.

Where do we go? Where on earth can we go? Just now it’s climbing into abandoned buildings, onto roofs and looking at the stars and talking about the place we’ll have one day with big, beautiful windows and always the deep smell of a home all our own.

But you can’t just leave your past self, your poor, wandering ghost. You’ve got to return once more, one last time when you can still call it home, and you’ve got to breathe in. Breathe in, close your eyes, and softly, with love, kiss your ghost goodbye.