Spectral Exploring

Sometimes I stare into the reflection after midnight with all the lights off. I look into eyes muddied by the dark, glittering still with the moonlight filtering through the small window, and wonder how many times I can tempt the devil before he takes the bait.

I want him to take the bait.

Come play.

There's never any response unless the hollow, bone-chilling silence counts. I never count it.

Come play with me.

Something did this to me and I have no idea what. Who looks in a black mirror and hopes to see a monster looking back? Who yearns to see something they can't recognize?

I just want a friend.

Someone to sit in the surrealism humming beneath this reality with me.

Come on, come sit with me.

The bathroom is a shitty place for spectral exploring.

So I take a hammer to the mirror and play in the blood of my cut palms like a child suddenly taken by the glory of unrestrained finger painting. Everything is a canvas. Skin, porcelain, tile, glass, everything. I am the paintbrush and my soul leaks words that no one seems to listen to.

Sit with me in the den.

The couch is pretty enough, comfortable enough, good enough. Something I could settle with. That's the way of it, isn't it? Settling for loneliness. Settling for adequacy. Settling, settling, settling.

Sometimes I think the couch was better than good enough.

That maybe I preferred to sit and sleep and wallow on her pillows. Maybe I liked that sanguine color too much. Maybe it fed my soul without me even realizing it.

I'll wait. Just come find me.

Loneliness is an eternal thing.

I wanted to be needed when the blood was warm in my body and now I want to be needed too, but there is no blood in me, despite there being some in you.

Come find me, won't you?

I want to be remembered.

That is its own sort of eternity, isn't it? A settling into the bones of the living, passed down from one generation to the next until I am a concept, muddy and misunderstood like prehistoric poetry.

Pick me to remember.

Put me in your arms and bastardize what I meant to say. Ruin the images I left cryptically painted on the walls of my home. Sit on my boring ass couch and tell the world it was my prized posession because maybe it was.

Maybe hearing it in your voice will convince me that I'm not a ghost at all. That I'm not dead and gone.

Make me live.