Love Letter Catacombs

Haunted by a letter and a house of ghosts, a man must choose between the living and the dead

In my hand was the key in paper form, a scuttling scorpion ready to sting. And in my heart was mortal doubt, endless valleys, and continents of needs and desires to separate — an ebbing debilitating curse. I didn’t know how to cross them alone, those ancient bridges tattered by gravity and time. I didn’t know how to face that courage lost so long ago; that which lurks in the taciturn dark. I feared the echoes most.

I read on, nonetheless.

“Only fifteen thousand and three-hundred more infinities until I get to see you again,” I said to the ghosts in the room. They nodded their shadowy heads slowly, like meditating gothic priests. So many of the dead have passed through these halls — bearing tragedies in their empty eyes and iron lung breaths.

The haunted epistles resonated within vacant walls, never quiet nor at rest. Words forlorn, carrying a lifetime of forgotten promises. I never broke our wedding vows, though, just put them on pause for a later date — for those clocks of the heart to beat again.

It was a forever ago when you wrote this for me. And it was eternities ago since I could put it down. What number of forevers were we on?

I reread it. Hoping the incantation would open the door to the next world — to you.

Boulders fell down the hills of my tongue with every word.

The door stayed closed, however, as the ghosts arrived and departed like haunted seasons of the soul.

Shall I push those boulders back up tomorrow? There’s no other choice, for, in the crypts of every room, I speak only to the dead now, my only hope — the hemlock in my chalice.

How many times have I read this note? How many years had that tattered parchment seen? My hands trembled with its unbearable weight.

Yet I held the paper firmly, like shackles around my heart. The years that trickled by like spring rainfall. Those apocalyptic floods scoured away summer heat and drought. Do you remember the once ship that carried us to new lands? It sits now along the Monterey Pier, collecting barnacle rust.

Perhaps I’m Steinbeck’s ghost in Cannery Row, waiting to be loved again. History is washed clean by the waves of writer’s lies, where some people are those ancient relics, poems in scattered verses, unwritten by the tremble of sober hands.

The house has started falling apart. They always do in the end.

At first, it was only a shingle or two, then the door fell off the hinges. And after that, the paint started peeling away. Rusty nailes lost their hold. I told myself I would fix them, but it got away from me. Dust piled up. It was hard to move with the note in my pocket. It was hard to live at all in the house of the dead.

“Become us,” they uttered, summoning me to the shadows beyond the stairs. The areas of oblivion, that held my curiosity like lover’s gaze. “There’s light in the dark,” they said. “There’s forgetfulness in unbecoming.”

I have to hold on.

“You’re fading away like us,” A ghost named James McKinnley spoke. I know him or used to long ago — a good Irishman with a propensity for a drink and political monologues. “Soon, all da light will be puffed out like a melted candle. Gotta make your choice, lad. Can’t stay here forever.”

There’s that word again: forever.

The ghost tipped his dark-green newsboy hat and walked through the door before me, disappearing like steam on a mirror. He was now just another friend lost to the murky unknown.

Other ghosts came and spoke — those translucent stories of transient moments.

“Oh, kiddo, don’t you ever stop your heart from growing,” the ghost named Evelyn Rose said, an old woman wearing her 1920’s headdress, who sang Jazz in empty rooms, unable to let go of lost fame. “It’s a good heart. like a garden, just needs watering.”

“Grandma?” I croaked. But it wasn’t her, just her essence in a strange phantom. I sighed. Just another lonely mind seeing faces in the clouds.

“Someday, you’ll see through those dirty windows at the rainbows,” she said, kissing me on the forehead. She walked off into the dark, behind the world. Tears filled my eyes. I told my goodbyes, as I always did, with the note clenched in my hand.

That night a storm came.

The winds screamed desolate and rapturing ululations from the pitiful sky, like beasts from hell. Hail pounced upon window panes and faded stone. The house swayed and bent. The pounding boney knuckles rapped upon hollow doors. I shuddered.

A thunderbolt clamored, sending cracked and jagged splinters along the walls, as brick and mud disperse within its crevices. Fear grew around me like heavy boots. Then the ceiling caved in, with a giant bear-like roar, bringing with it the old elm tree in the backyard, branches fell like scouring daggers.

As I turned to run, a man stood before me. He was a looming shade of fear and judgment.

“Time to go,” he said, extending his hand.

“Who are you?” I gasped. I was still trembling from the frigid cold air from the storm.

“I am Charon, and you are stuck. I’m here to ferry you onward.”

“I’m waiting,” I responded.

“For what?”

“For her to come back.”

Charon shook his head. “There’s no need to die twice when once is enough. But before you can die, you need to live fully. Otherwise, it’s a goddamn waste.”

I was confused and rattled, as pieces of wood and timber crashed. Heavy collisions of metal and brick tumbled and fractured along the dirty wooden floors. My head oscillated, left and right; a paralysis of fear had gripped me. The chaos was too much. Windows shattered inward, throwing shards of glass around me. I shielded my face. Droplets of blood fell down my arm as I screamed.

“WHAT’S GOING ON!?”

Charon moved forward, shielding me from the next explosions of window glass and falling wood.

“It’s time for you to go,” he said as if we were two people having a conversation at a pub.

“What do you mean? Go outside!?”

“Trust me. You’ve stayed here long enough. This place isn’t yours.”

“It’s ours! And she’s coming back.”

Crash! More wood and glass flew around me. Our painting of the octopus morphing into a heart, lay shredded on a tumbling wall.

“This place was never yours or hers,” Charon spoke, as he placed his hand on my shoulder. “It’s time to make a choice.”

“I….I…I can’t,” I mumbled.

Crash! The upper floor careened earthward from a loud thunderbolt, reeling jagged gargoyle spikes in wispy flames. The fire was now beginning to eat the living room and spreading cancerous over the place.

“No…no…no!!!” I screamed as Charon led me away towards the landing into the front door.

“I can’t open this for you. It’s a choice you need to make,” Charon said, with mournful and furious eyes.

The fire moved with liquid tentacles inside the house, as more of the roof and glass cracked and screamed.

I sighed. “But, I’m scared.”

Charon placed his hand once more on my shoulder. “You’d be crazy not to be. But to live is the best kind of fear.”

I nodded my head and grabbed the door handle. Behind me, the fire danced its way towards Charon and I.

I turned the warm nob and opened the door.

“Thank you, and tell them..the ghosts…goodbye,” I said as I walked into the murky night.

…

As I made my way outside, with my coat over my head in anticipation of the storm, I met only daylight.

I dropped my arms to my side. The warmth of the sunlight was pure and true. I placed my right hand inside my pocket and brought out the note. It seemed to glisten in the sunshine, as I read. Words danced along with the breeze. And as I reached the final line, a gust of wind took the letter from my hand into the sky.

“No!” I screamed, jumping to catch the note.

Yet, it fluttered, like a butterfly, glittering mystery of another dawn. It flew and drifted and danced in the world. And suddenly it was gone, lost among the fields of possibilities. I knew then, it was never mine to have but only borrow, for some things were never to be caged away. And those words were meant to travel to a new lover’s embrace.

The heart abides in the fields of a new tomorrow, and through the act of letting go, it can feel again.

I walked away from the house into the lawn and meadow nearby, where a road sat.

In the delicacy of existence, I tasted every photon and perceived the emerald swaying grass and trees that reached out, like nature’s faithful souls. I smelled the buzzing of nectar feeders and songbirds. I felt each aroma of dried dirt and hot evenings cooled by brisk morning hyacinths.

I have chosen to live not among the dead, but among the living and the songs that keep us alive. I want to be seen and greeted by another. I want to feel again, even the hurt, for even that is better than the cold, nothing of a house of ghosts. It was time to let the light in.

It was time to live.

I made my first steps along the road, with the sun at my back, tears falling on my cheeks. I looked back to our house, but what stood there, in place of it, was an old colorless shack. The wood planks misaligned. Green mold and black smears of decay wrapped around it. There was no life left inside this heap of ghosts, a mausoleum of the forgotten. This house was never ours, Charon had said, and now I understood. That house was for ghosts and not the living, for the dark and not the light.

I wept.

Those tears were not goodbye to you, but a gift to myself. They are, as your letters spoke to me all those years ago, those bridges to a new life. They are my catacombs, but not every grave is for the dead. Some are for the living, to place down their fires and boulders and sadness. To say goodbye to what they were so, they can embrace what they can be. I want to meet that man. I want you to meet him, too. I want you to see his hazel eyes filled with hope and not with ghosts. So this is not goodbye.

For I will see you again, with a new face and smile and purpose. We will meet like old friends in time’s pond, reflecting back to us the tombs of yesterday. I will see you again, in fifteen-thousand three-hundred eternities in the fields of sunflowers. And it is there, where I will tell you my tales in the light of a thousand kisses. And every ending, will be followed by love letter catacombs, so we may rise and meet the sunset as one. This is not goodbye.

I walked forward on the new road. My shadow strode behind me, like the letter and the ghosts of the past. Always forward now, toward the living and the light.

© Bradley J Nordell 2020