Once upon a ghost story.
My story.
I was a ghost before I became the captain of a very nearly capsized ship. Sounds sad. But it isn't. This barely floating ship is my life raft. It may look ratty and un-seaworthy to those who skim the waves in beautifully crafted sloops, but I tend to think that most folks muddle about the waves in paper boats.
I likened myself to a captain, albeit one that will probably have a mutiny on her hands. Now I am likening myself to a ghost. These are just descriptors that allow me to explain the many facets of who I am. So many of us contain many different characters inside of our selves. Walt Whitman exclaimed that he was large and contained multitudes and so it is with me. Most likely so it is with you.
This leads me to offer this post as another introduction. If you will, the prologue to the previous introduction. The history behind the history....
Once upon a time there was a girl who let all of the hope she had for herself sit in the hands of other people. This girl loved a boy and they had a baby and the girl believed that she had everything she had ever wanted; the boy, a girl-child, a very fat, very short dog and a house to hold them all safely inside.
All was right in the world until the boy told the girl, who was holding their sweet child in her arms, that he wanted to rip the girl's arm off and beat her to death with it.
At that moment, the girl remained a girl no longer. She became a ghost. Or so she thought.
The ghost-girl and her daughter, together with their very fat, very short dog, struggled to find a new home.
And they did.
Ghost-girl and her daughter, together with their very fat, very short dog struggled to find renewed hope.
And they did that, too.
Happiness was theirs but only for a little while because you see the ghost girl, feeling very ghost-like and therefore not very substantial, found another person to hold all of her dreams. Again.
Silly ghost-girl. When will she ever learn?
Now, to be fair, ghost-girl was becoming less ghost-like every year. She was growing her skin back and her heart no longer beat so painfully on the outside of her chest, but instead was moving back inside where it belonged. At first glance, ghost-girl seemed almost normal but she wasn't quite. Why? Because she wasn't the keeper of her own wishes. She gave that job away to someone else.
Many of the posts in this blog are chronicles of ghost-girl, of the lost and sea sick captain. The blog recounts my pilgrimage toward re-animation and regeneration, if such things are available to non-amphibian beings who have lost significant parts of themselves. My re-animation allowed for a love story to take shape. A love story between a woman and the girlish pile of bones that she had been and between a woman and man who was really two men; the man that was and the man that is.
My love story with Jack and the near misses and rogue waves that have threatened to swamp us have served to help me understand that my hands are not made of ghostly mist but are solidly prepared to hold the wishes that my heart only needs to whisper into them.
