Ghosts

Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, there was a big creaky apartment building and a girl was there all alone. Suddenly, the door knob started to turn and the door flew open, and there was no one there! She screamed "AHHHHHHH!"

Wait a second, sorry, wrong ghost story (although that one promises to be much more of a nail biter than the one I'm going to tell). My ghosts are old feelings that come to haunt. Ones that are dead, but the phantom pangs come back like little ghosts of relationships past. For instance, the other night I was at the David Bazan concert and he sang a particular song that I love. But as he played it, this incredibly intense emotional memory arose of a moment when I realized how much I loved a particular ex-boyfriend. That boyfriend is married and the feelings that I have for him are gone, but the phantom pang was as intense as it had been when I first realized those feelings. As with any ghost, this one shook me, and I felt its brush long after the haunting moment passed. Those feelings had been real, and this was the ghost reminding me of them-- but what kind of ghost was this? The friendly ghost of a loved and lost pet, coming to remind me of good times now passed and a sense of nostalgia? Or was it an apparition of death appearing as a warning that such feelings would not again be experienced, at least not easily? I wonder.

More often than not, these ghosts haunt us with the insecurities and pain of their doomed final moments. They sneak up on us as we attempt new relationships and whisper into our ears their ghostly words. They cause a chill to penetrate an otherwise happy moment, they cause in impending sense of dread to fill our hearts that should be filled with joy. These ghosts, once they arise and decide to haunt us, are incredibly difficult to vanquish.

I don't want to live in a ghost story, but I seem to have picked up the wrong book.