Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

I was a wreck; indeed, there was something fawnlike about me in these moments, terrified of anything and everything, trembling and vulnerable to the slightest shift in mood. I had avoided the outside world in the weeks after your death, heartsick at the prospect of hearing your name or seeing your face on a screen somewhere. But this is America, where tragedies roll along on a conveyor belt with alacrity. One is boxed up and shipped out just as another arrives, shiny and new, on the showroom floor. Soon, the shooting at Harbor Plaza was replaced with a news story about the search for a missing teenage girl somewhere down south. Sore ga jinsei da—such is life.

“It’s good for them to haunt you in the beginning. It’s how we grieve. It’s how we get through it without them.”

“We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”

“One thing I know,” you said, “is that the longer you spend in darkness, the easier it is for that darkness to become reality. It takes form, it gains life. I’ve spent a lot of time in darkness, Aaron, so much so that I’ve churned it up and stirred it to the surface and made it this real, tangible thing. It lives alongside me. It moves when I move. It’s in the bedroom right now, waiting for me to come back.”

“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.”

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.