Ghosts

Mijia Murong, 2T3 PB

You wake up tormented by the nightmares of ghosts
You do not flinch when they approach
These days any company is good company
So you welcome them in for a cup of coffee
Ask them about milk and sugar

Here in the crumbling world they are a comforting sight
Something like a family of sorts
This haunting
You can always count on it to come back

You are back here in your childhood bedroom
Where you use to wait by the window for your parents to pull out of the driveway
When you would turn up the music
Rejoice in your new-found solitude
Now you sit by the same window
Watching the world suit up for battle

These days your heart resembles a graveyard
The way grief feels so immense without you having to count the gravestones
Funny how they call them casualties
As if there is anything casual about death

This is not the way it was supposed to be
You remember when the afternoon sun was a promise and not a temptation
When you knocked on doors bearing either cookies or an invitation
Now all you bring is danger
You can see it on their faces
That fear when you walk past them on the other side of the street
But aren’t we all?
Scared out of our mind, that is
And desperately trying to make sense of our own hurting

Aren’t we all in some ways curled up in fetal position,
Begging for a chance to be rebirthed?
Praying to start again with new flesh
Swearing that if we had the chance to do it all again

And maybe that’s how it all begins:
Healing, that is
Maybe it takes for everything to fall through the gaps of our fingers
For us to see that
Interlocked, our hands can form bowls
catch raindrops
the way we did on our tongues when we were children

And so maybe instead of a rebirth all we need is a remembering
I once heard that the antonym of “remember” is “dismember”
And by that logic perhaps we remember by coming together
By inviting each other in
To reach across all of this space
Become whole despite our dismemberment

Maybe you dreamt about ghosts not because you were lonely
But because there is something to be learned
From the way they find a way to show up:
Across time and space and logic

Maybe
Our ghostly bodies
Pressed against one another’s
Our phantom fingers
Interlocked
Are the brightest antidotes
To all this darkness