The Treading

What if ghosts don’t float?

No skimming, floating, no looking down from on high. No spectral bones or meat or tendons. What if they can’t move at all? What if they are trampled underfoot, everyday, always, as they strain for acknowledgement?

Help I’m alive

Help I’m alive

Stuck in dirt and murk and shit and dust. Writhing in the mire, squirming on the pebbled verge.

No diaphanous glidings, no auroral visitations. Just protoplasmic ooze slowly dripping through the rocks. Sinking. Sinking.

Help I’m alive

You won’t consider this possibility because when you bury a loved one the fantasy runs unbidden along the back of your eyelids: seeing them again in some small room, sitting at some immense table hovering in a white void. How have you been? Tell that old joke we both love so much. I’ve missed you. Let me squeeze your hand. Let me gently graze your cheek with the back of my fingers. Let me look into your eyes. Now we get to be together forever, just like I promised. Thank you for saving us a place in the stars.

Everyone still above ground constructing their own corners of heaven in their imaginations, maybe even different corners for different loved ones, and all these glossy visions are somehow born from the same part of your brain that fixated on dank root cellars and abandoned houses on the raggedy edges of the old part of town when the lights went out, dripping nightmares into your childhood bed.

And so you conjure them forth even as you shovel soil on their caskets and look to the skies. It seems more than a little ridiculous, but the alternative – seeking the departed in gutterslime and algae and glistening worm castings – is just too awful. Tears in your eyes, weaving the dead into an imagined future where you will meet again. This means that mourning is steeped not in the past, not in loss, not in memory, but in anticipation. Bereavement is a form of augury. Perhaps premonition did not exist before we first began to mourn.

Help I’m alive

You refuse to hear it in the way the stones clatter and spill beneath the dark soles of your heavy boots.

_________

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