The ghost I dread to be

July 10, 1980

She’s gone seeking to find herself near the sea.

My world feels incomplete. The nearly silent morning fill with gray light that filters through stained windows and into me.

The air is heavy with the promise of rain, and I wonder, will it also rain in Ocean City.

I wonder about ghosts and moist lips, and the tremors of wanting that comes at times like these.

The ache to write doing combat inside of me with the vacancy I feel at missing her.

And I wish she was here and feel the tug of each mile between us, and feel, too, how I felt years ago that dark day at the Port Authority when a pregnant Louise went back to visit her parents in New Jersey and I strode alone the streets of New York City like a ghost, wondering if she will ever come back, or would her parents keep her – far fewer miles between us than the first time, and yet me, needing to shrink the number of miles between me and the person I loved, tears in my eyes, fist in my throat.

I am again a ghost, haunting Passaic this time, but feeling as helpless as I did then.

This is the kind of feeling that builds up over the years and takes as long to dissipate, though it is difficult to know if it is reciprocated, and if her trip to the seaside comes from fear of being too connected at a time when she makes plans to disconnect from this life to start a new one elsewhere.

Outside, this early morning, Passaic comes to life with the squeak and bang of the arriving trash trucks and the stirring of my neighbors in the apartment next door.

I am never completely alone. But the world bends around me like iron dust on a sheet of paper to the invisible influence of a magnet, forming the patterns of my life I can’t always see.

She will return Friday having made up her mind and her world wrapped up in tissue paper, fragile yet tenderly preserved.

None of this makes sense – this trip or the one I took long ago, -- traveling around the world to find something that should be right beneath our noses.

There is the sense of massive change, not just between us, but in the world itself, and I wonder if it takes the shaking of the earth and the crumbling of stone to wake us all up and make us realize where we are and where we want to be.

And in this early morning hour, I am again filled with the echoes of doubt I felt back in the Port Authority that day a decade ago when I plunged out of the dark caverns into the gray streets, unable to do anything but wait and wonder, feeling utterly disconnected from the pushing and shoving crowds.

I am disconnected again, although I cannot see the crowds only hear the whispers of their existence beyond the walls of this self-created cavern in Passaic, as if after a decade, I have taken one more step closer to becoming the ghost I dread to be, knowing in my heart and in the still rational part of my brain, what her conclusion will be when she returns from the sea.