A lost friend is forever present; never really gone, an essential thread in your soul’s tapestry. Their spirits are memories, smells that linger in the air, songs, and places. Specters flicker in fleeting moments when the sun hits a certain way, a caught glimpse in someone’s eyes, or a child’s laughter as they play outside. They are the uninvited ghosts in your soul; sweet, intrusive, painful muses for the poetry of your life.
A pleasant yet painful mystery awakened him. His ghost muse, his former companion, visits him at night. An Art Deco moon goddess, inspiring his bittersweet creations and haunting his dreams, a part of who he was. His last sight, a blood-soaked shirt, a stabbing from behind, and then she was gone. The betrayal was sudden and unexpected.
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Beauty lasts forever. That’s a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the pain of knowing everything will someday leave us. That human panic to find meaning prevents us from admitting we will all eventually be forgotten. But as long as he lives, his friend is not forgotten; she lives on in the rooms of memory. That haunted house, memory, and what a savage, beautiful, painful, joyful, and cruel addiction that haunting had become.
Memory, that aging home that has been remodeled and patched so often. The original is barely recognizable. In one room, the sun shines in through the old-fashioned windows. Outside is a quiet bench by the lake, the sun on the rippling waters, tobacco smoke, and the peace of the moment in the eye of the storm. The quiet joke and the gentle glance, the knowing, the feeling of safety.
In another room, a dark, forbidding sky is visible through the window. There is room for only two in this room, but there is no companionship; they are alone together; inside them, the unspoken angst, fear, and hurt. This room remains locked and is opened only when the muse demands. When the pain must be faced because life demands justice, and when it does it often demands pain.
In another room, the pain has eased. Outside the window of this place in memory’s home, cloudy skies linger, and the wallpaper looks dull. Yet on the walls hang pictures from the past, beautifully curated by the mind. Heavily remodeled for guests and comfort. But the heart wants to choose its own recollections. When the ghost muse visits in the early hours, it feels conflicted about this art the memory has selected. There is an argument between the man, the muse, and his pain.
This is why the ghost comes only at night, when the mind wanders dangerously in the quiet wasteland of its thoughts, when the heart is open and vulnerable. She quietly debates the choices he makes. The argument is never finished. The pain is never gone. The defenses are never strong enough.
Maybe she also thinks of him during these most uncomfortable moments, this muse, this lost friend. Maybe she occasionally looks to see if he’s still alive, out there. Maybe the apocalypse will reveal something hidden in the haunting. Perhaps she, too, wanders through memories but keeps herself busy with the fullness of life. But her world is full; the rooms of her house are either locked or filled with new furniture. Why should she look back, like Lot’s wife, and become a pillar of salt?
The gap between the man and the muse persists. It cannot be closed. Across the universe, the energies of sadness, longing, love, hate, desire, and revulsion blend into countless connections. These are connections of absence. They can never be fulfilled.
