Everywhere I go, I see you . . . even in my sleep;
In windows, on streets, through school-yard fences;
I see your face in small children in their mother's arms -a time I did not have;
From the toddler boy in a stroller or playing with their toy car;
To the all-knowing tweens and teens around the city;
And in the young college men who surround me on campus.
Haunting and tormenting me through ways unimagined. While I am not alone walking through this process. Ghost, I tell you that I take no comfort that others share the same path. I want you to know, it just doesn't matter how many others there are who are haunted by ghosts like you.
But I need to find a way through this abyss or you will certainly change me. I need to find a foothold onto something, anything, that will not haunt me as you are doing.
And then the ah-ha moment arrives. Lifting narratives and connections from something else can be yours as well. Because you are always with me, hovering over my body, I am always trying to make sense of our path.
In the October 19th NY Times Magazine, writer Lisa Carver wrote about how she learned to love Yoko Ono that deeply resonated with my struggle. Go figure. Carver writes that, "Ono uses the negative positively, similar to the Japanese use of negative space in decorating and the unspoken in conversations."
She goes onto say that, "It’s paradoxical, but it seems that when you accept loss, it loses its tenacity to stay lost. Ono wived by letting husbands go; she mothered her daughter by letting her go. Lennon got the urge to roam, and she told him: Go! Go roam! And he did, and then he called and said he wanted to come home, and she said, No, you’re not ready. Ono believes in the right to drift."
And then the light bulb went off in my brain and subsequently in my heart. While I may give my life's work to preventing my ghost from troubles and assisting him when in the eye of the storm, I am thinking that I must learn to embrace the negative positively. I must find a place to accept loss and begin to be whole in my life.
If I cannot prevent the wholesale destruction that I can see from my rear-view window, then can I live with my role as the clean-up crew over and over again. Can, I create a soft landing, such as a discarded mattress on the street for him to lay his head, or do I have to see him flutterr away like a plastic bag in a breeze?
Right now, this is unknown. It is both a fear and an insight that rests in my heart. It causes the beats per minute to to be dangerously high and the volume of tears to fill an ocean. However, it maybe what will be.
In the night
thought we're apart
there's a ghost of you
within my haunted heart
Jane Monheit, Live at the Rainbow Room, singing, "Hauted Heart" (2002)
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