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Every marriage has its secrets. I understand this, Allison. I get it. Secrets are what allow us to cling to our individual selves while also being one half of a matrimonial whole, and can be as vital as breathing.
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The small secrets are easy to keep hidden—easier, say, than the big secrets, the whoppers, the infidelities and closet addictions that, like some underwater beastie that must ultimately ascend to the surface for a gasp of air, don’t remain secrets forever.
call it a “process” because, much like a haunting, it did not reveal itself to me all at once, but rather as a gradual widening and clarity of circumstance.
There had never been anything surface level about you, and the secret that, like reverse origami, I unfolded after your death was no different.
You see, part of me had blinked out of existence right along with you—another consequence of the marital union—and what was left in the aftermath only retained the barest essence of a human being.
It was your darkness that made me fall in love with you, Allison. Darkness of depth, I mean.
No one thinks when they first meet a person that there is some cosmic clock counting down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until you will stop knowing each other.
I was no longer a glowing rod of uranium, but rather had transmogrified into some amphibious thing, clammy with perspiration, fingers joined together by a translucent connectivity of webbing as I clutched the steering wheel.
but I saw some footage of it on the news: Main Street a somber tributary of people flowing toward Church Circle, a sea of black armbands and slender white candles tipped in a flicker of dancing light like wands capable of magic.
“I just want to make sure you do things. And don’t just stay bottled up in this house. At least go for a walk around the neighborhood or something. Get some sun on your face. Anything, Aaron. Keep active. Grief hates a moving target.”
I felt like someone with a terminal illness as I walked into the offices of the Herald. Heads swiveled in my direction. Who is this creature walking upright between the cubicles, pretending to be a human being?
There is a word in Japanese, ukiyo, which has no English equivalent. In Japanese, it means “the floating world,” and in essence it refers to living in the here-and-now with complete and utter detachment from the rest of the surrounding universe.
a dome beneath which we were fully immersed in each other and the rest of the world be damned. Everything we did—every dream and idea and epiphany we ever had—we shared with each other.
You kept all this stuff in our house; you kept all this stuff in your mind. I could decipher the progression of your thoughts—laid out for me in your frenetic, slapdash handwriting on sheets of yellow legal paper and charted by the dates of countless newspaper articles, some more than ten years old—as you pursued some dark and unfathomable obsession further and further into the shadows.
exhalation in my left ear caused a chill to ripple down my spine. I whirled around in my chair, my heart ratcheting up into my throat. The sensation that someone had been standing directly behind me, whispering in my ear, echoed throughout my consciousness with unwavering certainty…
“We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”
—You’re just scaring yourself, other-Aaron advised. You’re like some superstitious fool divining portents in tea leaves.
“Once she was gone, it was like a part of me broke off and floated away,”
He’s like a ghost but, like, you could touch him and feel him if you just reach out. I never touch him, though. I’m never quick enough.
“When your kid dies, you find that you’re not afraid of nothing no more,”
“When she saw him across the street, she said she could smell him, a smell like a fire. Like something burning. And then she’d smell it again somewhere else,
You once said to me that you and I existed outside this plane, where space and time were wound into a ball and not in a straight line. We would always be together because we had always been together. We were acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts, you had told me, were time travelers not bound by the here and now.
It was not dreamless. Things happened. I can’t remember most of what I dreamt, although I am certain—and this certainty is born from experience—that many of those dreams were about you,
But this was real life. Unlike fiction, real life labored under no obligation. Stranger things have happened, so they say.
—You’re wrong, argued other-Aaron. That was not Allison. She was the last person who needed some Prince Charming to swoop in and tell her everything would be all right. She would have been disappointed in you had you tried. And what would you have done, anyway? Knowing this would have just made you feel helpless and futile. She was always stronger than you.
“A vision,” he said, and it was only here, in this moment, that a fire gleamed behind those sly fox’s eyes. “I knew she wasn’t real, but she had come back. The vengeful angel. Only this time all in white, burning like a forest fire, and instead of a face she wore the moon.”
“By the time I’d completed a year of rehabilitation, I was stone sober, and my mind had cleared. It was like a storm blowing through a town, leaving bits of debris everywhere, but also clearing the skies at the same time. And it was in that clarity—the calm after the storm, I guess you’d call it—that I realized who that woman had been. God almighty, but it took me a year to put a name to that face.”
In the cage, the birds became frenzied, nipping at the bars with their knobby gray beaks. Feathers spiraled about the room. “I bet I’ll see her moon-face again tonight,”
The sky was perpetually dark from the smoke of the gas fires, and when the refinery eventually closed down, the air still tasted like soot. All the men had black fingernails and the women had purple pouches under their eyes. It was the missing circle of Dante’s hell.
“Water would flood through the town, and when it receded, it left behind black ash and mud on everything.
There were no birds—the refinery kept them away, the stink of it unappealing. Birds are smarter than people in that way. We stayed and the birds left.
“There’s a man made up of poison gas who lives in an abandoned castle. He’ll get inside your skull and drive you mad.”
I dreamed of you ghosting toward me across the surface of a river,
where you can exist along two timelines at once. Like, you could be standing on a street corner but also somewhere else in the world at that exact same moment. Sometimes you can see or hear yourself talking through one of those rips in the fabric of the universe.
She opened the lid and I saw that it was filled with photographs. They were scattered about in there, in no particular order or arrangement, just loose and existing and touching each other like memories do.
We will always be together because we have always been together. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.
There is a word in Japanese, yugen, that has no English equivalent. In Japanese, it is the awareness that the universe transmits a profound and mysterious beauty that can only be understood by the man or woman engaged in the comparable beauty of human suffering.
