A walking graveyard.

That is the thing that the city you grew up in becomes around the holidays.

A TOWN OF GHOSTS

You can almost feel the planes descending, bringing the weight of memory back down to earth with every person you ever used to know, used to love, returning home. You can’t go anywhere without running into the phantoms of your life. Suddenly, it is all real again. Suddenly, seventh grade heartache is walking down the street, waiting to hold your hand on the corner.

So these weeks become perpetual guessing games, tests of memory. Is that—no. Wait, maybe—yes. Oh god, it is, or thank god it isn’t. The ghost of the first person who ever held your hand, shopping for toothpaste all of these years later or the older sister of your best friend from high school, the one who gave you your first shot of vodka back when you still liked to drink things that tasted like battery acid.

Walking around my childhood neighborhood is like walking though a minefield, waiting, just waiting to make one wrong turn and find myself knee-deep in small talk with my first boyfriend’s mother. As much as I would love to know how the family is, I would love it much more to not implode.

Some things are meant to stay right where they are.

Our past lives are short films, running on endless loops in various settings. I can almost hear the director shouting CUT! as I stumble too close to any one of them. Stranger on set, will someone please—wait, we know you. This is yours, isn’t it? Your story, your heartbreak, your birthday party. Tell us, are we getting the details right? Were you wearing a white blouse or a black one? Was it Nina Simone or Nora Jones that filled the air? We want it to be just right.

I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.

THE ART OF BROKEN THINGS

And so it goes, from set to set, street to street, reliving the escapades of a fractured youth, still just in awe of how the light comes in through the cracks. Kintsugi. The Japanese art of repairing broken things to give them a new, refined aspect. Tell me, do I have a new, refined aspect? Am I all the more beautiful in the places where I broke?

Like a ceramic bowl with gold veins melding the fractured pieces back together, I show of my own golden rivers like hard won battle scars to the ghosts of the girl I was here, there, running around that sun-melted track, right into college and back out again. Around and around, she runs in my memory and I do my best to hold her hand and promise her better things. Brighter things. Gold-filled, not so shattered things.

I write about ghosts like they are lungs and I am air. Drawing me in and spitting me out, over and over and over again. I let them because I love them. I love them because I need them. Like any good lungs, they sustain me, providing allocated spaces of nourishment to come back to when I need to be reminded of what has mattered, and what will matter again.

Ghosts show me that I have loved well. Been loved well.

LOVE AS WE KNEW IT

I was flipping through an anthology that I wrote back in high school titled, not even a little bit melodramatically, Rome Fell and We Danced in the Ruins: An Anthology of Love as We Knew It, and it was the rawest thing that I maybe ever wrote. Filling those pages of coughed up prose are the sweetest incantations of devotion to the thing that I was feeling. The thing that I was always so caught up in the labeling of, never sure and always wondering if it was love.

I see now that that is never what mattered. It was love because it felt like it. We were in love because we didn’t know any better.

I see now that learning to know better is the worst thing that can happen to anyone.

Today, I am so enraptured by school and work and this blog that I can barely even fathom a relationship, let alone love, but how sweet that it was once so simple. How sweet that I once stood on the very edge of a cliff that overlooked the ocean, the earth stretching on so far and wide that we swore we could see the end of it, not yet knowing that we couldn’t see the end of anything. Not even that day. Not even that moment.

I saw a post the other day that was titled One Whole Year of Love as an ode to her boyfriend. I thought it was such a sweet concept, to catalog your year in terms of the love that filled it.

Right now, I am filled with love for art, writing, and really good jazz. Winter sun that pools on the floors like honey. And right now, that is enough. Right now, that is so much. I fall asleep looking forward to waking up, a simple concept that was once not so simple.

Consciousness has become a dream.

Love, M.

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