Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

She was the same on Friday morning as she was every other morning: acerbic and goth,

Nice

“Mistakes have consequences, but they don’t have to break us. The next time it happens, I told him, I wouldn’t consider it a mistake.”

The only reason anyone called instead of emailing was because they wanted something they knew they had no business asking for.

It was why she found horror movies so comforting. Her adult life had turned out to be a series of patterns and routines. She knew what to expect of a given day, but that didn’t always mean life was particularly interesting, or that she was particularly fulfilled, or that she knew what the point was, other than moving from one space to the next. At least when a guy with a butcher knife is after you, when a werewolf is loose or a poltergeist is messing with your furniture and your head, you know what you’re fighting for.

It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising—though maybe it shouldn’t have been—that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable. Tuesday was bored.

Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.

Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.

A broken heart hurt like hell, but it kept beating.

“We spend our whole lives becoming worthy. Of ourselves. Our mysteries, our solutions, the fruits of our quests.”

Libraries had always made her feel like a kid, in a good way: secret and safe and taken care of, rocked to sleep in a cocoon of books.

Her face didn’t so much conceal the riot of the mind behind it as it did contain and frame it, like a door to a strange new universe.

But he didn’t have to be all one thing or all another. He didn’t have to live only one life at a time. And a living wasn’t something you made but something you did. Again and again, over and over, always, always becoming.

“Don’t cheat your friendships. Don’t ask them to mean less to you than they do, or think they only have value if they’re a stop on the way to a real relationship.” Dorry rolled her eyes. “All relationships are real,” said Tuesday. “Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It’s all a kind of love, and love isn’t any one kind of thing.”