Old Haunts Past Lives

Perhaps it’s a writer thing. Perhaps it’s just a me thing. Some kind of spiritual quest, a questioning nature, an urge to explore the things inside that can’t be touched, to play with the strings of one’s soul and see what songs it plays. I have no explanation. But sometimes I want to visit the places that haunt my past. I want to see the ghosts. I want to listen to what they tell me and feel if they have any power left to pluck the strings. I want to taste the air that I tasted when I was a different person.

I went today—to an old haunt.

With the help of a friend, a friend who I don’t think understood my desire or what I hoped to find. He’s way too grounded in reality and fact and reason. But it is the nature of good friends to not question things like this, so he went with me.

I drove up into the driveway I used to drive up into. A different car, a different me. It felt weird and familiar, but yet not familiar. I knew immediately this place was haunted. It wasn’t a good place. The air felt almost hard to breathe, oppressive. I felt the ghosts hovering. It felt like visiting a prison cell where one was once held captive. There have been lives march through these ghosts of mine, but they didn’t erase what I left behind. I felt the overgrowth of the weeping cherry I loved in the spring, the tree I’d fought for early on—a battle I’d won when I still wasn’t broken, when the battles shouldn’t have been fought at all.  I felt the loss of the weeping willow in the back yard. The long arms of that willow whispered in the wind, but it fell over after I left, crashing down like the dreams I’d held on the day I’d planted it. All that is left are weeds that stretch as high as trees themselves.

I looked at the dirt and the decay staining the walls, the broken lattice, the faded stain on bowed planks of a deck. It’d been clean to the eyes when I’d been there, but now I wonder if somehow it had always been like this, hidden from eyes that saw only the surface. It’s a good metaphor regardless. The weeds are in the process of ripping it all apart, reclaiming it like some sort of Chernobyl of my past.

Inside there is a new paint and carpet in empty rooms.

It felt like a house at first and in the moment I was there. I noticed things like none of the doors fitting properly. The light switches are warped and not flush against the walls and most have don’t cover the uneven carelessly cut holes for the electrical boxes. I remember how the electrical didn’t work right, how the flow of power waned and waxed at different times. I noticed these things with eyes trained by a man I love teaching me how things should be done, how things should be built with care. Something I suddenly appreciate about him so much more than I did when I woke up this morning.

The rooms are emptied of furniture and photos; and, when I first went through, I wondered at how this had become just a house. But now that I’m analyzing the why, I think I was lulled by those ghosts into being blind to the things I was always blind to in that place. Every room had a memory of sadness. The emptiness had always been there, but once it had tried to fill itself with pieces of me. Now, there’s no sloughing off of pieces of my soul. This house holds my sadness.  Which is strange for the me I have become in the house I now live in because every room here in this place I am now, holds joy and laughter and peace. It’s a smaller house, but the rooms are holding so much more.

In that garage, I remember the piles of old carpet that lay there for months, the ladders lifted up to places where I couldn't reach them and could never use them and could never get anyone to help me get them, the pile of tools holding two empty tool boxes that had once been filled with what had been mine—lost in the pile and whisked away because tools belong to guys, even guys who won’t use them apparently.  In my garage now, I see the blue and I smile because while I will fully admit that the garage isn’t “mine” it is a place where I welcome where I can find what I need, where if I need something I can get it and use it without reaching and failing. It’s a room where I see Doug cleaning his car with a little tiny brush to get dirt out of cracks he can’t reach into. I see him and his son working on a car and looking over the lifted hood to give me Subway orders.

The kitchen of that house is open and spacious and frankly I like it better than mine. But, mine is where once I accidentally sprayed Doug with the kitchen sprayer—a memory that I’m laughing about even as I write it down. My kitchen is where I painted it and accidentally got paint on the cabinet. There is bamboo on the wall, terra cotta army on a shelf, a jade Buddha laughing.

That living room and dining room had a chandelier which was taken down and laid in a box for more than a year, bare wires hanging over a Thanksgiving dinner despite begging for just a third arm to stand there and put it back up. That arm never walked the 10 feet from the couch, I had to get my dad over after I sold the house to help put it back together. My living room and dining room have light fixtures I hung, a fan I hung myself. It has pictures and plants. That living room used to have a big fern I’d had for years and a live ficus tree I’d kept since my grandmother’s funeral—the fern ended up mysteriously dying, the ficus too.  But this living room is teaming with plants and light.  The blinds are always open while they never were in the other place.

My office in that house was a cave with one small window and a desk with hutch placed so that it blocked the room’s door. It gave me just that window and the computer screen. I remember getting yelled at for buying a stereo and headphones so I could listen to music while I wrote. I remember being told I didn’t need an iPod or MP3 player like he did. My office now has a shrunken head and swords and a knight in shining armor down on one knee holding out a pen (it’s the first gift Doug ever gave me).

This house has nights filled with laughter and giggles like slumber party talks. That house had restless sleep and resentment and tears.  This house has patches of sun with a dog filling it. That house had someone upset because a book was being read and a dog condemned to the downstairs level.  This house has a sunroom with white curtains that blow in summer breezes like they do in movies with exotic palaces. That house had closed blinds and shadows.

“You should move back here,” said the neighbor. “Fix this place up again.”

I laugh at the idea. “I can never come back here. This is the past. This is writing research. This is the memory of a lost soul.”

I’m alive here. I love here. I love who I am. I am happy. My home is my sanctuary. If I ever leave this place, I won’t drive up the driveway and feel like I’m looking for high fences, barbed wire, and watch towers.  Here I will remember learning what I loved, the thrill of coming home after spending an afternoon at the range, dancing with Doug in the middle of the kitchen (which reminds me, I’m going to have to get the Echo Show to give us lessons on how to do The Git Up when Doug gets home—look it up Blanco Brown.), cooking breakfast in our pajamas with Doug screaming every time the bacon pops until I’m laughing so hard I’m crying, books in the sun while the sound of a router roars in the garage, the grin on Doug’s face as he looks at how shiny his car is after he cleans it. The Sponges, Raccoon Pee Guy. Let’s not forget the Gathering of the Bitches event in the driveway where the Sponges never came outside, but we laughed and listened to 80s music—a dozen 40 yr old women wearing lounge pants in the driveway, roasting hotdogs, kids laughing and running around until late.

Yes. It does seem this isn’t the story of a house after all, it’s the story of people. It’s the story of love, where it is and where it isn’t. It’s the story of friends who never visited and those who have driven by to deliver a cold diet Coke on a long afternoon or come to sit on the porch and talk about everything. It’s the story of two men, one who crushed my soul and one who makes it soar. It’s the story of darkness and light and where I found it and how I found it and how I treasure it. It’s the story about happiness and a lesson on how easy it is to lose. It’s about an empty house and a full one and who wins the poker hand at the end of the game.