Spark from 3AM Epiphany #101: Ghosts
After I was dead, I took up crossword puzzles. It was a way to be close to you--a way that I had taken for granted before. Back then, on Saturday mornings, you would sit at our kitchen table with your cereal and coffee, pouring over the back page of The Times, focusing intently, working it all out; and I would sit in my office with the pretense of working, scanning celebrity gossip blogs.
We moved in and out of one anothers' spheres, saying very little. Our domesticity had grown quiet and distant, never hostile but rarely affectionate. You still called me "sweet Caroline," and I still ran my fingers through your thinning hair, but we were absent in our own gestures. Years of hope and vision that had never been realized had taken their toll. We each ventured back inward, to places closer to where we'd been before we'd met.
And now that I am dead, I feel closer to you than I did then. We had wandered around like ghosts for so long. Now that I am dead, I sit next to you on the bench at the table, reading the clues, making suggestions that I don't think you hear--but that you say to yourself as you focus intently and work it all out.
And sometimes you talk to me, though I know you don't believe in ghosts. "Sweet Caroline," you'll say to a picture in a frame. And you tell me the things that you never said back then.
