House of Ghosts
I’ve climbed back into my bed again. I’m hoping it will be warmer here and it seems safer than the rest of the house. I’m usually here or in the kitchen when I’m home because the second floor has too many ghosts; Dave in the office, looking at his computer; Dave in the bedroom, lying down and looking at his little computer. There are ghosts of him watching TV in the living room too. I’ve always thought it was plausible that the boundaries between times are temporal, but not physical and in any given place everything that ever happened there is still happening in its own time slice. That would mean Dave is still here, still alive, just over those temporal walls.
I want to bolt from this house. I want to pack up a few things, get in one of the cars and drive away, never to return. It’s too awful, too painful, to be reminded every day that Dave is gone. Every time I go up or downstairs, I pass by our bedroom and for a moment it feels as if everything is ok and it is a familiar place of refuge. Then I remember that nothing will ever be ok in this house again. When Dave died, it lost all of its power to protect, to nurture, to be a home. It’s a haunted house now, memories slicing and nipping at me everywhere I go.
This house was a lot of things. It was the place in which we had our routine, it was the location of my garden, it was the House of Bad Cats. Now it is a house of ghosts. As long as I live here, I am living in the past, and someday I am going to look back and wonder how I survived this phase. The only viable option is to sell it as soon as I can. Conventional wisdom says to wait 6 months or a year before making any decisions, but I need to start a new life. I didn’t choose this, but if this is how it’s going to be, grim as it is, I need to move forward, if for no other reason then to keep on moving.