Anyone's Ghost

by August Thompson

He was serious, reflective. So I didn’t say what I wanted to, which was The military is for morons and kids who get DUIs. You can do a lot better.

Always, I tried to find places I could discreetly enjoy the lives of others.

Once the women were gone, I was left with men and I was left with boys. Men and boys never made me feel comfortable. I wasn’t allowed to observe—I had to do. I had to fight, or I had to play shortstop, or I had to hold the flashlight or do push-ups or break glass. I had no interest in doing. I was almost completely defeated by simply being.

When I googled those four insufferable words years later, I was struck by how confined Jake and I felt in America, on July Fourth, in the Live Free or Die state, under the watch of some Libertarian ripping us off in a hyperinflated free market of tickets and tokens. That there was something inherently suffocating about being how we were as boys—sensitive, soft, sweet, all the dance-around words mothers use—in that time, in our homeland. And I am struck, too, that the only person in the world who could confirm that Funspot was a part-time propaganda dispenser is now gone. That I can only insist, snickering and wine-drunk at a house party in a Red Hook loft, that the world’s largest arcade in the great state of New Hampshire asked me who John Galt was and that I was too stoned and laced and naive to answer. I tell it all with glee—what I leave out is the rest of it.

I wanted to start things over, to live through it all again until I became sick of it. I wanted to tell Jake that he was the single most amazing person I had ever met and if I never met anyone new, that would be all right. I wanted to tell him about the things I didn’t have words for, about the star-yellow orb in my stomach that somehow burned without harming.

I told her about a boy I’d known when I was fifteen and lifeless. How I felt a closeness to him that was both a beautiful medley and a dissonant mash-up. How I missed him but certainly didn’t love him. I couldn’t love boys—I’d never felt that strongly about a boy since. And in a moment of wisdom so incisive it almost harmed, she grabbed my hand and told me, “All I know is I’ve never missed anything I didn’t love.”

I said loneliness was the emotion I knew best. Then I said it was awful to feel that way and that I was sorry. He told me I didn’t need to say sorry because it wasn’t my fault. I could never understand why people needed to clarify that. That I’m sorry is not an apology from me to you but an apology for being. I’m sorry that life is this difficult. I’m sorry that there’s so much harm to be found. I would give anything to change the nature of the world, even if I could change it just for you.

I wanted to say: Build in me a lighthouse. Be guided by the love I feel for you, for the safety I want to offer. Put knives in your wheels and leave the truck until it’s ticketed and towed. Move your bags into my room and stay. Find a job at a record store, become a security guard at the Met, don’t work at all, and we can live off my twelve-an-hour as you make every record you’ve wanted to. We can take it slow; we can move fast. You can leave me and come back. You can be exactly who you are or you can be what you’ve always wanted to be.

I am so unsure of the allowance of grief. Can I really mourn someone I hardly knew any longer? Should I feel pained by lives I never led, with him, without him? In my mind, this is the bounty of grieving—that I can indulge all of the fantasies because they are now guaranteed, with violent finality, to never come. And yet, if grief does afford me all of this possibility, then why do I end up feeling so impoverished?

Too many men who have made me in their image and then left. I’ll say how lonesome it is that there’s no one alive, outside of a few cashiers, who saw Jake and me together. And how there’s no one but me who saw us be ourselves.