Ghosted

by Jenn Ashworth

Today I live only in the present because the consequences of things going wrong are easier to see and more frightening to imagine than they were back then.

I wonder if we all have lots of versions of ourselves tucked up inside our heads – a whole choir of possible understudies in there, some more trustworthy than others, but all waiting impatiently for their turn onstage. I feel them inside me sometimes, flickering in a great silver shoal, arguing between themselves, never quiet, never unanimous.

We were – students and domestic and estates teams – pulling in two different directions, each party’s effort cancelling out the work of the other, until the only sensible thing would have been for both parties to just down tools and leave things as they were.

(we called the students ‘Wankers’ and the academics ‘Staff Wankers’, just to distinguish them from each other, though in practice, there really wasn’t much difference at all)

I watched the sun go down and willed one of the cars that passed on the main road to indicate and turn onto our street.

Some nights, one of those shimmering, flickering selves inside me made strange bargains with the universe.

‘Schrödinger’s wife. That’s me.’

And we had ended up bending each other’s bodies and personalities into a shape that would fit nobody else’s. The slow and uncomprehending recklessness of it astounds me now.

it wasn’t a ghost, it was me.

little lie now and again kept us from madness and that was all there was to it.

I’ve come to believe that most special bonds between people are made of the things they say to each other that they could not possibly say to anyone else.

There’s no formula or physics that makes sense of the human heart when it longs for something, I have learned.

I’ve come to understand the sad truth that people hardly ever speak frankly to each other. The closer they are to each other, the less frankly they speak, in fact, and the more pretence and evasion there is.

People being angry at me was the second-best thing and provided a relief of its own: proof that I really was as terrible as I felt. But

There’s a way of looking at films and books that counts how many times women talk to each other about something other than a man. Useful, no doubt, but it does not take into account the fact that the only time women can talk about the wounds and pains men have caused them is when the men are out of the room and they’re alone together, on a headland, watching the colour of the sea and the clouds gather and blow inland.

August dragged onwards, and that sense of being watched as I went about my business faded, or rather attached itself to the solid and explicable presence of Mavis herself, who did watch me, sometimes with care and sometimes with suspicion,

If you were a stone in the way of your grief you only shattered, and in the shattering turned yourself into shrapnel that, hurled through the air by the force of the event, harmed every single fucker with the misfortune to be standing anywhere near you.

For grief you have to be soft, and let it come towards you like a train, and when it hits you’ve got to let it knock you off your feet, and when you’re down, you have to lie still, blinking, as it rumbles above your head – like the waves of a great storm at sea, or a tornado. Which after a time – a very long time – passes over.