Confessions of a Ghost
Article by Margot Swetich Art by Max Montague
In the morning, I swing my feet off my lofted bed and I stand without touching the ground. Feeling the softness of the air, I glance down. My feet are hovering just above the cold tile of my bedroom floor. I try to walk it off like it's an injury and my dad is watching, but there’s nothing I can do to reach the ground. I try to swim down, just to feel the earth, but my desperate hand can only fall through the world, warping through solid life like I am mist in the summer air. I should be excited that I can walk through walls, but all I can wish for is to be alive again. I am a ghost.
Sometimes when I’m out on a walk or enter a busy room, I feel like the smallest person in the world. The thought pops into my head: “I’m the tiniest creature.” It isn’t my size, though, not truly. It’s more of a transparency, like I’m a cup of water full of salt that has dissolved perfectly. Like there is substance that one must search for. Not all people put in the effort, but if they sip me they find me overpowering instead of seeing me as something to gargle, as something with a particular use. No, I don’t think I am always useful. Sometimes I just taste bad.
Perhaps that isn’t right. I am more solid than air but less solid than water. I am something that floats, but I am not transient like a cloud. I’m stuck where I am, no matter where I go.
It occurs to me when I look in a mirror and do not recognize myself that I am already dead. I am a spirit trapped between worlds. There is no one qualified to exorcize me. I worry that I am an unsettling presence because of this. I can never truly be with the living. Even if they don’t know it, everyone I meet is haunted.
When you are a ghost, it is easy to forget that others can see you. For most ghosts, I would imagine this isn’t true. They can exist without being worried about prying eyes, only seen if they cause a commotion. I am not expected to disappear, but I do it anyway. I force others in my life to look for me, to ask where I have gone. I lose my grasp on the plane of the living. I drift underneath it, or I slip through its clearness into a haze that most people only see when they get high. That is what it’s like at times. I feel like I am high when I am not. There are people who would say that sounds enjoyable, but the entire time I am in the hazy world, I am begging to be let out of it. In this ghostly plane I cannot move quickly enough, or speak loudly enough, to change my state. I am a Claymation person, and every flashing image takes painful effort to form. I move inch by inch and agonize over each frame. I wonder about how I got the keys to this hidden room of consciousness. Were they an heirloom? Was there a skeleton key in my genes or a secret code? A curse? I have never run into another ghost. I would be grateful, at this point, to find out that someone else was stuck haunting this world.
I feel evil on those days when I can’t focus my eyes or locate my body. If I run into someone I know, even someone I love, I am completely without the resources to interact with them. They ask me how I am doing, and I forget to return the question. I speak only in short statements, mumbling, “good” like a reticent teenager. I let them all down and sometimes make a first impression that is impossible to repair. They think I’m cagey, or they run into me on a day when I am not ghostly and could be friendly, but they feel confused or think I am being fake. All because I wake up dead some days, but not every day. I can’t help it. With strangers and acquaintances, I can be destructive. Even dangerous. I can not be trusted to make new friends without making a playground faux pas. With close friends, I can tell them that I’m having a slow day, and they’ll leave me alone, checking in the next morning to see me alive and no longer strange. I’m not sure if my friends can see how translucent I am or if they just know to look the other way so they don’t spook me into disappearing completely. I am grateful for their gentleness.
Today my ghostliness is more of a friend to me. I like to taste it, to notice when it dips away and when it returns. There are times when my brain demands that I be alone, when it roars at me to isolate and float across the earth without any connection to anything. There are times when I choose to be alone, when I cherish myself as the only thing I need. Ghostliness is something I want to perform, to allow myself to slip into the in-between and just feel everything–my own soul, if it exists, and the fullness of the air and the earth–that envelops me.
There are two of me: one of me is the “I” which I speak from now, and the other is the ghost whose body I hold at night when I try to coax it into sleep. To me, these are separate things because someone else responds when I tap my shoulder and say it’s time for rest. There is something living there beyond me that snaps its teeth at my fingers or needs to be shaken into wakefulness and action. How do I make sense of this? Would I be more at peace if I could pull these halves together, or if I could remove one completely? If I were never that ghost, would I be relieved, or would I feel lonely without it? I think it’s possible I’d miss my ghostly self, who is so purely part of life by being separate from the corporeal world.
When I first realized that I was a ghost, I thought it meant that I was supposed to be dead. I thought that I had stepped over my allotted time, and I was destined to feel like I was a specter because of it. It was such a cruel and morbid way of thinking, and yet I feel that my first instinct about this sensation may have been right. Why should a living person feel so disturbingly separated from reality? Why should I constantly have the thought “I do not exist?”
I would have had a ball in the time of skepticism. Shakespeare thought about it a lot, the idea that we can never be sure that others exist in the same way we do, or that they exist at all. “Art thou not Lysander, and I Hermia?” he wrote. I try to make assurances to myself in the same way, but I cannot. How can I prove to anyone that I am real if I myself do not believe it? When I was in love, I used to wonder: how can this man love a person who tells him she doesn’t exist? How can he know me if he doesn’t know that I am split in two, and that he could never meet the ghost inside the person he knows? Does he too contain a ghost who I never met? And if he does, then how can I possibly claim to have loved him? I was always trying to get him to acknowledge there was a deeper part of him who I didn’t know, who I wanted to know. I’m not sure what it would do to a relationship to think that you fully understood the other person, fully knew all their layers. It might be a foolish endeavor to try. Like pretending you know God. In both cases, you are faking an understanding.
Once, I saw the man I used to love in a place and at a time I didn’t expect to see him. I turned a corner and seeing him was like walking straight into a mirror. Facing him, I saw my doppelgänger. He was so familiar to me it was like he was a part of or a version of myself. How am I right there and also here, where I’m standing? I remember thinking. I told him that I felt like I had bumped into myself, not him, and he didn’t get it. It was the most vulnerable I had felt in a long time. It’s strange how you can know someone impossibly well and yet they still can’t enter your head even when you explain over and over again how you feel. A few weeks ago I caught my own eye in the window of a bar, and I didn’t recognize her. Or I did, but I didn’t know who she was. What mattered to her? Where was she going? Where did she want to go? I realized I had no idea. When I see him next, I wonder what it will be like, if there will be any of the doppelgänger effect left over. I think I might see a little bit of myself haunting him. I am good at haunting.
I like to take pictures at museums of statues and paintings of women who I think bear a resemblance to me. The problem is that I see myself in nearly all the faces. That’s the thing about feeling like a ghost, is that one becomes almost transient through history. While I don’t think I believe in reincarnation, it seems to me that I am contained in everything. I do not come from every woman who has ever been painted or sculpted, other than through the connection of our sex. From what has been constructed for both of us, or our matching bodies. And yet, in my not-so-solid personhood, I feel the ghost in me call to the ghost in those works of art. I have been collecting examples of ghostliness in other women, trying to figure out if mine is connected to something broader. I want to find a way to feel that it is less painful. I want to find a way to perform it and to love it.
The novel Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson tells the story of a transient family, of women who don’t want to sit still in one place. They are travelers, known only by others who are always on the move as well. They are misunderstood by those who live stationary and acceptable lives. I feel a connection to these women. Not because I don’t ever want to settle but because I find it uncomfortable to be overly corporeal. I’ve been alone in my travels for several days and I don’t have a single photo of myself because of it; this disappearance from my own camera roll suits me fine. I am not meant to have evidence of myself. This reminds me that I have outrun my intended death. However, stories like Housekeeping help me imagine that ghostliness is not a death, but a way of being alive. And I don’t feel the need to disappear completely, just to go unseen when I feel called.
I went to Eiko Otake’s exhibit that was featured at the Fine Arts Center last spring. Films were projected all over the walls, showing her moving her body in ways that felt unnatural or broken to such a degree that my brain was forced to question why we move the way we do. Clothing and blankets and books and ropes taunted me from the floor, begging to be touched but requiring that they weren’t. The noise made me feel like I was going to weep and I didn’t know why. There was wailing from one side, and running water at the other. The weight of the body is heard as Otake moves in waves through her films. I couldn’t help but feel afraid in that space.
In one film, I saw my ghostliness played out before me in the way the artist moves. It made me wonder what it would be like to embrace and perform my transparency, rather than to shove it down and fear it. To move slowly, to slink into softness and feel my fragility. The issue is that sometimes I would have to be something frightening, and other times I’d just be free.
At this point, I can usually hide that I am not quite real. But what if I couldn’t? Would I be something to fear if everyone could see that I am haunting them? That I am already dead? There are times when ghostliness feels gentle, but these are rare. If everyone knew, could I finally float above the earth in peace?