Haunted

It's fascinating how an idea can affix itself to your awareness, like gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. Earlier I had read a post by Q that later, would inspire a failing of sorts. All day, dark and heavy, clinging close to my head, thoughts of her hung like an executioner's hood; my mind buttressed by metal beams and scaffolds, covered in curtains like a building condemned.

I'm ashamed to admit it. Guilty like a gym on Monday. My resolve dissolved and wore away, small grains of sand blown on a breeze. I've committed a kind of suicide. I died in a dream. I texted her. When I woke, I stood naked at the front of the classroom, my vulnerability on display. 

On the way back from Sonoma on Saturday, James and I spoke about the relation between love and loss. I remember saying that the hearts of men are like seashells scattered across a shore, lying lifeless and empty, waiting for a woman to come and climb inside. Love is to be possessed. It is when the creature departs, though, that the shell's emptiness is realized. The lost sense of intimacy and fullness, replaced now by an ossified and stale residue, skeletal in its vacuity.  

The rolling waves supply an ocean of inhabitants, always more to replace the one before.  With each new tenant the shell becomes a bit smaller as memories of the past accumulate, occupying space. In time, it becomes a miniaturized haunted house, slowly bleaching beneath the sun; a beach house for its ghosts.

Nothing occupies a space more completely than the memory of a woman.