ghost goodbyes

My ghost got married October 20th, last Saturday.

He doesn't get to be my ghost anymore and I want to say goodbye. Best of luck to you and your new bride, Larry Edward Magee. Wishing you all beautiful things in this world, and only the fullest life. Wrote this July 2006.

I just woke from a most distinct dream about you. I had snuck into some two story house you had been living in for some time. I was going to knock but you were in your old blue robe, talking to someone on a chair and I didn't want to interupt. I moved to a side room, watching TV and petting Chloe and you came in laughing at me, wanting to know what I was doing there, how my day had gone. You had braces and were a local high school teacher. Every time you tried to ask me a question about my life, I'd turn it back on you- I couldn't hear enough about what you were doing and how your life was going. Then the phone rang, and rang and rang and I woke up from your ghost, to the Airstream wrapped brightly around me, my hand petting Chloe on the bed. I was so mad at that phone, taking me from a moment with your ghost when he actually spoke to me, even if the information was false.

Usually your ghost just sneaks up silently, hovering around the passager seat of my car. He hides in songs, tons of them, even ones that weren't alive yet when we knew each other. Last weekend he was in Esquire magazine, in an article written about Teriligua. It was his voice, if not his words. If I were being honest, I'd say I see or feel him every day.

Every damn day.

I've stopped being angry with him for coming around and just expect him to pop up at odd times.

I miss you, Edward. I'm not asking to get back together. That, apparently, isn't right. We couldn't be in the same place and I wasn't mature enough to work through difficult issues. But I miss talking to you. I miss hearing your guitar. I miss your friendship, I miss your presence.

YOUR presence, not his. He's just whisps of memory.

I understand why you haven't written me back, that it's safer that way. I also know the last letter I wrote wasn't 'real'- I started to tell you about your ghost, but pulled back, afraid it would come across all wrong. I wrote draft after draft, and feeling like I was running out of time, finally just wrote the simples about my life. "Can't find the time to write my mind the way I want it to read" WIlco, Box Full of Letters. It must have seemed fake. And you don't have to write me back from this one. If you don't, then I'll know for sure our knowing each other is over and knowing for sure is a good thing.

I'm getting married, next June. We've been engaged since January. He's a good man- intelligent, handsome, loves music, is a little hippie, a little nerd, is laid back and, well, spoils me rotten. (He's of course more than that, but how do you fully describe someone you love?) We've lived in this Airstream together for almost a year and are making it just fine. I stick out our arguements, although all I want to do is run (sometime I still do, to the back of my head and pretend nothing's wrong- such a coward). He doesn't know what a big deal that is for me. He meets me halfway and tries to help me fulfill this long list of crazy dreams I store up over time. This September I'll spend a few weeks in Hawaii, surfing and working on an organic farm. And hopefully this time next year, we'll be getting ready to move to Boulder where I'll start graduate school in nutritional anthropology, he in either math, physics or engineering, whichever appeals to him most at the time of application.

I am waking from that dream now, and am again not quite sure what to say to you, not even sure I'll send this letter, like so many before. I know, though, if I have any hope of any friendship, it's time for me to be more bare, more honest. Somewhere over these last fews years, I've grown a stronger backbone, a better bluntness and I'd like to share those with you, to see what happens in return. But again, if there is no return, I can just accept that peacefully as the way it is. I hope this finds you well, Edward, and happy- moving forward in life and unafraid to take on the things you need to feel awake. My nephew is still in Dallas, and I still travel up to visit regularly- maybe a cup of coffee would be better than letters.