Here, you can listen to the whisperings of my soul.
Who am I? A dreamer, a curse, an endless night, a lover, an artist, a rotting corpse, a deep dark ocean.
There are so few things I know for certain, so I give my questions legs to run and voices to scream.
A little melancholy, always savage. Feral, wild, untamed. A haunting, a drowning, a beginning of the end.
Leave your sensibilities at the door.
For those among you with an insatiable appetite, who hunger to suck the marrow from my bones, come stalk me across the interwebs:
Adore your lover as though they are already gone. Drag your fingers along the outline of their absence, caress their body as it dissolves into mist. Every love letter a eulogy, every word a prayer against time.
Listen to the cello rattling in your hollow chest. Dance the death waltz. Dip your lover low, let them drink the blood at your feet.
Pluck the wilting roses from your chest, growing through the cracks of your ribcage. Bite off the sharp thorns and swallow the blood on your tongue. Plant the flower in your lover’s grave, let it wither and bloom.
Dig up your bones from beneath the willow and carry them home. Lay them in your lover’s bed to chase away the deathly chill. Count them, the worms always steal. Remember the wet earth’s embrace and hold your lover the same.
Lay your heart on your lover’s pillow. Muddy the sheets with your life-essence. Serve it on a silver platter. Watch them tear into it with their teeth, swallowing the chunks down, until you are left sitting in the pit of their belly.
Return to them every night. Haunt them by moon and by sun. Claw yourself out of your grave, nails splintered and bleeding. Crawl through mud and moss, knees raw from dirt and leaves, lips blue and drooling.
Mourn them, and mourn yourself. Your love is eternal; your bodies are not. Mushrooms will eat you before your soul rests. So learn to love as plants do, as trees do, as wind and rain do. Turn your leaves toward them. Rustle your branches when they come near. Sing their song in the breeze, flood the forest with your tears. Abandon your human love; it will vanish before you do.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
I want to watch the sun rise and fall in the wide, expansive sky until it swallows us whole, and even then I want to hold you as we drift through an empty universe.
But I’m not allowed to keep you.
I get you as long as I draw breath, not a moment longer. And my lungs have an expiration date coming far too soon.
When I’m worm food, mushroom fertilizer, the soil bed upon which they will grow cotton in the blistering fields, I will have loved you for but an achingly brief moment.
My love burns for you. It burned for you yesterday, it will burn for you tomorrow.
And when the day comes that the bonfire I lit in your name is nothing but ash, it will have been worth it. For it burned all the brighter because I don’t get to burn forever.
The soil will forget us, as will the sun, but somewhere on the wind we will be remembered.
In the cicadas’ song, in the gentle current of the bayou, there will be the ghosts of us.
We are not infinite, but I will love you infinitely, until my very last breath.
When my lungs dry up, and my heart stands still, I may forget how to love you, but I’ll remember that I did.
There are those who have already sunk into the marrow of a place, drifting through walls unseen, yet their hearts are still beating in their chests. I call them “Obsidares”, derived from the French obsédant, meaning obsessive or haunting, and the Latin obsidēre, meaning to besiege or occupy. These beings dwell in thresholds, occupying liminal spaces. They linger.
These creatures - for surely they cannot be called people any longer - have loosened their grip on the world. Not enough to vanish, but just enough to flicker.
They exist in places where common people no longer belong: old school buildings, empty houses, grocery aisles at midnight. To find one, walk through these spaces, speak nothing aloud, and let your footsteps echo. Let the dust rise from where you’ve stepped. You will not be seen, but you will be witnessed, you will be perceived. Something will shiver in your wake.
Their clothes never quite match the time in which they are present. Their bodies will be littered with secrets and memories; a ribbon in their pocket, a pressed flower in their hand, a scent on their skin no one can name. They collect pieces of their pasts to stow away like talismans, guiding them back to who they once were as time forces them to forget, relics of the living person they were before the haunting began.
They spend their days writing letters they don’t send. They sing lullabies no one can hear. They sit in the sunlight and make eye contact with crows. They speak softly to the wind, and it actually answers.
Their existence blurs the line between presence and echo. They become the space between breaths, the moment just before a candle is blown out. They are gentle, and they are strange. They know they are misunderstood, and they exist anyway.
When you come across one, they will always remind you of someone you used to know. But do not weep, do not wail. Do not mourn for them. They are not dead, not really. They are transformed.
When you leave, hold your breath, lest you inhale a bit of them that you cannot return. Keep your eyes forward and don’t look back. You may be tempted to join them in their obsessive, devoted ritual of life and death in tandem, a constant ritual of waking and dying, but I warn you. They require a reverence few people are capable of. The depths of their emotions could capsize great ships, bring the fiercest warriors to their knees.
