Ghosts

I've never believed in ghosts. But regardless what someone believes. There's always something coming around to prove whatever belief is wrong. Like justice, for instance, or faith. It may be possible to cling to a thread of a belief. Take justice. What it would be like to achieve it. All those bullet holes to heal over, and, like with Lazarus, rise up and walk.

I dreamed she was dying. I dreamed we sat in the swing on the porch of her house. All the crows, they all lined up on the railing, scrunched up together and silent, heads turned to one side or the other. We sat and I held her hand as she was dying, watched as she watched the crows, as her head, too, began to tilt sideways.

I didn't know what else to do. So I gave her a name. I called her Shannon.

Where I lived many came before, their bones all scrunched up together underneath where I walked, on top of bones, bones and dust and centuries of things compacted and, any day now, ready for transformation. And before Shannon I'd never wondered who they were, nor cared, because they were, every one, gone away from my vision.

Gathering their names didn't help, tracking down their names and reciting them. It prompted me, I suppose, but it didn't help me to feel them, nor all the others whose names could not be tracked and recited.

But in that space between present and future, it may be that we are joined with those others we refer to as dead, and those others, still, whom we can't yet imagine, whose names can't be tracked and recited, because they are not yet born.

Into me I breathed a part of that dust that made her, that made my mother who carried me, dust consisting of her, of Shannon, a piece of her and now me, and it was that particle that she came back for, wanting me, it's owner, to understand, and remember, where I came from.