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Today my ghost turns 36. His birthday is easy for me to remember. He was born the day before me, in the same hospital. Back when he was far more than a ghost to me, I used to imagine that that fact created some sort of eternal tie between us. That we were meant for each other in some sort of cosmic way. What can I say...I was a romantic. I think we met around the beginning of high school. We didn't have a lot in common--we attended different schools, had different interests--but we happened to go to the same church youth group/choir and later we attended a church theater camp together. I was bookish, serious, shy, writing poetry to express loneliness and longing for love. He was quiet, gorgeous, serious mostly about jazz music and plants (something I was oblivious to at the time...well, there were lots of things I was oblivious to then!). Given his looks, it's not surprising he was almost always hooked up with some girl or another--even got engaged while still in high school. I fell in--love?--with him the first night of the first camp we went to during the summer after our freshman year. The camp was held in the Santa Cruz mountains above Aptos. That night, four of us who knew each other from home snuck up to the top of the hill where a panorama opens up showing the stars above and the lights of Santa Cruz in the distance below. We hiked up in the dark and lay on the peak making up stories and giggling, then stumbled down back to our beds. No sex, no drinking, not even any kisses were exchanged. I remember lying there curled up against his wool plaid shirt, how he smelled, the growl-purr of his voice with my ear against his chest. The next day--maybe the day after that--he'd met someone else at camp and was deep in a summer romance with her. Through high school, I loved him--or at least my image of him. We were friends--I developed a skill in being friends not only with him, but with his girlfriends. He and his girlfriend told me about their secret engagement, even. I went off to college, found others to have crushes on, tried to forget him. The first Christmas vacation back, though, I found out he and his fiancee had broken up. We saw each other at church, and I gave him my school address when he said he'd write (this was back in the days of snail mail--no email yet--and getting letters from home was a big deal). And tried not to think about it. He wrote. A ten-page letter, I think it was. I was on cloud ten. Through the rest of the year, we wrote each other. I learned about his love for jazz and the vocabulary of a jazzer. He learned what it was like to be a beginning computer science student. We wrote poems--mostly I wrote poems, but he wrote some too. We arranged to get together when I was home from school. Didn't happen. The ghost had other things to do. And it was funny...there were a few times we did get together in person. When we did, I found I couldn't talk to him, couldn't relax with him. I could be more myself in writing, but even there, I was presenting an image of myself and I was afraid to relax for fear he wouldn't like me. So I became even more quiet, shy and serious than I really was. The pattern was set--months would go by when I wouldn't hear from him, then I'd get a letter out of the blue and we'd pick up from where we left off for a month or so. He came and visited me at school once. I visited him once, too--while on the way to or from somewhere else (I had no car, so was somewhat limited in my visiting abilities). Somewhere along the line, I got tired of the merry-go-round and decided not to contact him anymore. That makes it sound easy...it wasn't. I think I was addicted to my image of him, haunted by it. It took a year or so before I wasn't thinking of him daily. We saw each other at church one time--the first time we'd seen each other in maybe two years--and sat together with some other friends. I was very aware of shrinking into the image I'd made of me for him, and how it didn't fit any more. I was the ghost. The summer before Wayne and I got engaged, I received a wedding invitation from him. I didn't go. I tried to ignore how I felt about it, to concentrate on how happy I was with Wayne. It worked for the most part. But I'm still haunted by him. Every so often I think about him. I can probably thank him for at least some of my interest in gardening. If it weren't for a poem he wrote about blue-eyed grass that he altered to refer to me, I wouldn't have a collection of blue-eyed grass varieties in my yard now. I think now he was more a muse to me than anything else--I wrote more poems to and about him than any other (including Wayne). I still wonder where he is sometimes, if he's still married, still blowing sax in a jazz group. If he ever mastered the oboe. And if he's ever haunted by me. Cheryl p.s. Happy Birthday, wherever you are. |
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