The hardest ghosts to get rid of are the ones in our conscience

My dad walks towards me, the light is dim and I’m in my friend’s beach house, where we used to spend our summers drinking and playing card games, running into the ocean in the dark like ghouls howling in the night. This house had always been my escape, her grandmother lived a few doors down and when I had run away from home for the first time I had stayed with her; an old Italian lady who insisted on feeding me sweet tea and bread.

I’m in the kitchen and the sun is setting, casting burnt orange colour through the kitchen. My father is drinking red wine at the large dining table, I blink and suddenly I’m in the chair opposite facing him. His eyes are bloodshot now and he hums that song he loves, Losing my religion by R.E.M. The humming is low at first then heightens until I feel as if the vibrations are moving my body, my blood rippled by the beat. As I sit he ages in front of me as I stay the same, I can see the wrinkles around his eyes deepen like the marks on a tree trunk and he shrinks in front of me until he is but a small wrinkled man. His eyes looking straight into mine, the speckles of black that I see reflected in my own.

I wake in a pool of sweat, my camisole sticking to my back and my long blonde hair wet and sticky against my neck. I get up, fling the covers off my body and sit staring out the window and out onto the street down below. I hadn’t had a nightmare like this in ages, when he first died it was nightly occurrence, my own personal punishment screening in my mind every night.

This morning I have woken up groggy and with my mascara from last night staining my cheeks. I’ve been smoking too much weed, I can feel my body dissociated, as if I’m always too stoned to react. I look down at the city that’s ever changing, growing, evolving, and much like I felt, never staying the same for long. I could hide here, all my bad decisions and mistakes seeping into the pavement, no one cared about you here or where you were from.

Since my father died I had wondered if I would be visited, I had always labelled myself a ‘believer’ making mountains out of mole hills and calling shadows remnants of the past. The dark doorway in one my old house I swore was the ghost of the past owner, walking the halls looking for answers. I needed to believe that one day all my guilt and pain would be resolved by a dusty figure leaning over my bed, telling me all my sins have been forgiven. But like most I had never seen my father since his death, the hollow hole in my life larger as I aged- missed birthday’s and milestones adding salt to my wounds.

I wondered, is this obsession with ghosts, horror movies from million dollar franchises, just a form of being coddled. It’s too hard to think that one day the ones we love will be all but dust, buried beneath us as we try to move on with our lives. Paying bills and running red lights, working on our careers or lack thereof. Is this belief just a manifestation of grief? My dreams where I see my father just a projection of my guilt? My guilt for living my life when I should have been mourning the end of his. I feel like sometimes this guilt I will carry for my whole life and beyond, I can imagine it weighing me down even when my body returns to the Earth.

I had to leave. I had seen how the cycles of life went in my home town. I saw the teenage mothers become grandmothers in their thirties, living in falling down houses and working in the dimply lit diners near the railway. I had wanted more, I always had. I couldn’t see myself as one of those women, their husbands working on the farm, our children growing up wearing worn out shoes.

I deserved better, so I worked accordingly, building a new life, my fears of becoming another teen mother, another drug addict, another suicide, pulling me to where I was now. My price for my selfishness taking form as a missed phone call one night as I poured wine to the rim of my glass and laughed. I hadn’t been there. My father drawing his last breath as I had laughed and smoked stranger’s cigarettes.

It did get easier though, more bearable. I stopped waking up in the morning screaming and the guilt had subsided from an ever -growing depression above my head, to a small raincloud that followed me near and far. I kept my past to myself and if anyone ever asked about my parents I would simply reply that my mother lived far away, working in a tiny petrol station off the main highway. I never told anyone the truth about me, my new friends only new this version of myself, this version I had worked so hard to create.

Sometimes I’d see something that reminded me of my father and I’d go to text him like an old habit, a ghost of a reflex I used to have and then realize that where he is know is beyond the reach of a text; only in my dreams we touch.

I didn’t like people too close. I avoided dates and anything beyond moments of pleasure with strangers. Then I met him. The epitome of ‘right person, wrong time’; my best friend. We had been on and off for some time. I missed him so much my arms ached, my chest felt tight and hot tears spilled over cheeks and crawled down my jawline when I thought about him for too long.

Sometimes I think we loved each other too much. There’s too much love there, too much passion. I dread the mundane but maybe that’s where stability lies. A happy life, not bad, not good. Maybe he’s right, my mother too. I’m toxic, a danger to myself and others. A plague I should have known better than to subject you too. So what do we do? Us damaged people. Run? Hide? Is there such thing as being too damaged, beyond repair? 

It feels as if your happiness as an adult is dependent on how heavy your baggage is, as if we’re at the airport, hands entwined, waiting to see if my suitcase is too much for you. Any time we got too close to the scales I fled and found myself right back where I started.

One afternoon, a few weeks ago, I fell asleep in the armchair that faces the garden we have, the spring rain coming in quickly and wetting my feet, I was reading a book when I closed my eyes and opened them to my father in front of me. A dream so vivid I feel as though it was real, he reached out and stroked my face, his temple presses against mine. It was finally happening, my visit. Suddenly he’s gone; and I look up to see an old lady in front of me, she looks like me, a lot older, the wrinkles around my mouth and eye creased like tissue paper; a life of laughing leaving its mark.

I wake up with a start, gasping for air. I go inside and turn on my radio, it plays R.E.M as soon as I flip the switch. I make dinner for my roommate and I, homemade pasta just like my dad used to. As I clean the last dish I sit down and wrap a blanket around me and text him, the one that got away, or just the one I pushed away.

Grief needs to be felt, but all the hardship and pain and all the baggage you hold doesn’t have to weigh you down forever. There is life after trauma and loss, I promise you there is. There’s a sober life full of ups and downs and love and support and community waiting for you.

Our ghosts are just that; ghosts. In the corner of our eye as we fall asleep, the shadow crawling out of your wardrobe, the dark cloudy corners of your mind. You are not your past, you’re not what you were and I promise you that one day your ghosts will forgive you, they’re only our ghosts until we let them go.