The Ghost in You
Sometimes I forget. I go weeks without a thought of him, weeks of acting like he didn’t exist and the whole thing never happened and then there is a sudden intrusion; a Nick Cave song, an old piece of mail surfacing in the file cabinet. It comes back. Sometimes there’s a wave of grief, a mourning for the space where I didn’t remember. Sometimes there’s just a sigh, a resignation that it will never go away.
My second marriage was born out of the despair of the ending of my first marriage. The despair began a few weeks after he left — at first I was giddy, ecstatic at the freedom I had found — and lingered long enough to transcend into a bloated depression, a murky and turbulent sea of mental anguish which put me not in my right mind.
I agreed to marry him in the post-haze of 9/11, when the world seemed like it was minutes from ending and everything felt frantic and unsure. Getting married again would be a salve slathered on a band-aid. It wouldn’t keep the world from imploding, it wouldn’t stop me from worrying about every god damn thing, but it would provide a flimsy sense of stability. A positive step in an era of negativity.
We had a lovely backyard wedding. The DJ played Nick Cave’s “Are You the One That I’ve Been Waiting For” as we walked across the deck to the Judge who would marry us. I wore an off-white pantsuit and later changed into a black dress. I drank too much tequila. We honeymooned out on Long Island, stayed in a cozy hotel in Port Jefferson and walked around the streets hand in hand, tourists in our own land.
That was the last time we were happy. Those are the last breezy details I remember. All the other details I recall are of things disappearing; companionship, stability, him.
He didn’t disappear completely at first. He didn’t leave until much later, until I forced his hand. But the image of him became thin and wispy, as if he were turning into a ghost while still alive. I viewed him as an apparition, a specter lingering in a place he should have left.
We went our separate ways in the same house, retreating to different rooms with our different interests and different needs. I watched baseball, he watched anime. I sat in front of my computer and made friends on various message boards. He chatted with a specific girl and asked me how I feel about open relationships.
A nothingness fell between us and we walked around each other’s footsteps like we were avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. We talked, but the talks often turned to shouts and the shouts to my tears and my tears infuriated him at the same time they satisfied him.
The house became smaller, our shared space tighter. The walls — painted shades of deep red and orange — shrunk and moved in on us. We squeezed past each other in the hallway and when the hallway became too tight for us, he stopped coming out of the bedroom. I slept on the couch. I woke up in the middle of the night, each night, feeling as if there were someone sitting on my chest. I was immobile, unable to breathe, think, scream, feel. There was just weight and darkness. Eventually the paralysis would subside and I’d cry softly, hoping not to wake him.
There was a ghost in my bedroom and I had no idea how to exorcise it. It wasn’t just the ghost of him, but the ghost of the very idea of him, the idea I had back in the beginning, the idea I had when I said I would marry him as we sat in a Chinese restaurant talking about the skies being empty of airplanes. There were ghosts everywhere.
I stopped sleeping. I listened for him, for the sound of his feet shuffling across the wooden floor on his way to the kitchen. I listened to the muffled sound of his voice as he talked to someone on the phone at 3am. I listened for the clack of his keyboard, for the door closing behind him. These are the sounds a ghost makes as he lives with you. I sat in the dark, holding my breath, willing myself to not break down, trying desperately to cling to the edges of my sanity.
And then he was gone. I packed his bags for him that day, in a rush to get him out. I drove him to the train station. We didn’t say a word on the way there, just stared straight ahead as if we were each riding alone. In a way, we were. He had ceased to exist for me, and I, for him. We were ghosts to each other and all that was left to do was for him to drift away.
I think of him now as a whisper. I have no idea where he is, what he’s doing, what’s become of his artwork. I don’t google his name. I don’t think of him unless something comes up — usually a Nick Cave song — that reminds me of him and then I think of living with a ghost, and how that almost cracked me in half. When I think of him, I think of the spaces where I forget and how nice it would be to live in that space always, to not have the shouts and tears and panic come back so I wake from a dream with a half scream perched on my lips.
Sometimes I forget. I forget how this house closed in on me, I forget the sleepless nights, the breathless panic, the rough hands around my neck. But ghosts like to linger, fragments of them lining dark corners waiting to grab you by the throat. You never really exorcise them. You just forget sometimes.
