Love Letters to the Ghosts
These love letters have been written to the ghosts of my childhood, those entities who either terrified or shaped me by their presence. These letters will be added to as time permits.
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To the Ghost in the Attic
Dear Ghost,
I remember lying very still, hoping you wouldn't find me. You always did. As soon as I heard you call my name, I knew what would happen. Your voice dripped out of the walls of the house, itself an old, old thing, half-buried beneath the ivy. It slunk down the wooden steps from the attic above, moving in like a dusk fog. Over and over my name filled the room, growing louder and more insistent as your force gathered. You surrounded me, pushed against me, trapped the air in my lungs until I was cut adrift, free-floating, bodiless in the void. No sound, no heartbeat, only my feeble consciousness praying for release. A rush, and then your voice was in me, your terrible syllables crawling under my flesh. I was violated. No one would help me, for no one believed in ghosts. I don't, either, now that I'm an adult, but after all this time I have to ask, did you ever believe in me?
love,
the girl who hid under the covers
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To the Ghost in my Bedroom
Dear Ghost,
I don't know why I still remember you. How is it that some things are retained and others left to fade as time crawls on? It was you that made the horses dance. I could not help but watch them rear and kick in your macabre display, an impossible circus of plastic and plush performed just for me. I think you scared me most of all, for there was never any sense of you. There were only those horses, prancing and stepping in place upon the shelf that, in the day, was still and ordinary. There was nothing ordinary about you. I gave my collection of ponies away, dispersed your power, let my childhood friends be naught but toys as they should have been, just as you should have let me be a child.
love,
the girl who watched from the hall
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To the Ghost in the Dogwood Tree
Dear Ghost,
What did you do with all of those marbles I so carelessly tossed up to you? I must have lost a hundred in the limbs of your small tree. Each marble, in my mind, became a flower on those branches until even you were lost among the blooms. You defied the laws of gravity by keeping them aloft and I—unaware of any law that said this could not be—delighted in the game. I wonder if, when I stopped playing, all those marbles fell like petals to the ground until another little girl came by to pick them up again.
love,
the girl who sat in the shade
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To the Ghost Under the Bridge
Dear Ghost,
We were suspended there, you and I, between steel beams and burnt ties, beneath the great roar of the train and when it passed, the river came to life below us and the leaves rustled in the still air left behind. We met in this place, you and I, between earth and sky, iron and wood, on the catwalk below the tracks, before you were a ghost. Do you remember? Why did you jump? Now you are between forever, and we can no longer meet under the bridge as we used to do.
love,
the girl with the sun in her eyes
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To the Ghost at the Piano
Dear Ghost,
All I ever saw of you was your opaque shadow as I peered around the corner of the stair. All I recall with any clarity is the shape of your bustle and train as you passed in front of the many-paned window that sparkled, but for where you walked, with the light of the stars. Each night your journey was repeated—as though trapped in those few movements, your feet could take no other path but the one that led you to that instrument. It was my upright I heard in the room beyond, when all in the house were sleeping. Those few random, phantom notes rung into night's silence and chilled me where I sat with my fingers curled around the railing. It seemed to me you were searching for a song, but your fleshless fingers could not find the melody you needed. I've since learned that I was not the only one to hear you. None of us ever doubted your existence. Were you sad when they removed the piano, all those years later? Were you even there? I like to think you found the song and with our belief grow solid enough—just enough—to strike the note that finally set you free.
love,
the girl on the step
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