Haunted

October 1, 2022

I woke up early this morning and just couldn’t get out of bed. Some combination of the gloomy weather and my mood, and some pain in my head and neck put me in this state I don’t like to be in. I like to wake up and hit the ground running (sometimes literally, running) on most days. I like to clean a few things up, take a bath, put on clothes and makeup, take some selfies if I’m feeling good about myself, and take Maudie for a stroll. I do my best to face the day head-on, as if I woke up on purpose. This morning, though, I put on some socks and a sweatshirt and crawled back into my absurd king-sized bed, and stayed there until Maudie thanked me to know it was time to go outside. While she was still snoozing, I turned on The Haunting of Hill House and stayed in bed for several hours, watching the end of the heartbreaking, heartwarming, scary show about a family. The show chronicles a family’s past – their grief, their internal drama and tension, their love and forgiveness, their struggles with mental health – plus ghosts. It’s a lot like that show This Is Us, but with ghouls and monsters. I tried to watch that show once, This Is Us. I made it through a few episodes but had to stop watching because I felt so affected by it. All of that grief and pain, beautifully portrayed on the screen was too much for me to handle. Isn’t that odd? I can watch scary movies full of gore and suspense and horror without flinching, but sometimes shows with too much emotion and hurt can drive me out of the room, the same way scary movies used to affect me when I was in my 20’s. I remember walking in on my college roommate once, and I think she was watching The Exorcist or something like that, and I practically ran out of the room. But now I find myself watching this show that’s pretty damn scary, and the stuff that’s bothering me is all of the other non-paranormal stuff. The normal stuff like grief and death and love and love lost- that’s what is getting to me.

I’ve been writing a lot lately – you may have noticed. It’s definitely a coping mechanism. One of my fears in writing so much here – in taking so much of myself and recording it on the page – is that you might read it and think I’m some sort of self-centered monster. You might think that all I ever concern myself with is my own pain, as if I’m under this assumption that I have a monopoly on heartache or rejection or loneliness or grief. Or worse yet, you might think I’m trying to draw on my own experiences to help you. I fear that you think I’m trying to pretend like I’ve got things figured out and that you can learn things from the tiny droplet in the universe that is my life. I hope you know that’s not the case, but this is a criticism that I’ve often thrown at writers. I look at the work of Rachel Hollis and others like her in the “self-help” section of the bookstore and want to ask them: Why are you writing about a sample size of 1 and calling it rules for life? How can you presume that your own experiences are so hefty – so impactful, unique and important – that you can write them down and use them as universal lessons that we should all take to heart? Why aren’t you zooming out to help people make impacts in their communities, in their families, or in the world? All of this self-stuff, it’s too specific and requires too many assumptions about an individual’s circumstances and resources to truly be helpful. I think it should be called self-help, only because the act of writing it all down- organizing your stories and memories and feelings in some structure that makes sense to you – can be really helpful to you as the writer. It’s a great way to help yourself.

Anyway, I was watching this show and there were some parts that made my heart beat really fast. I realized the reaction had nothing to do with the scary parts of the show. I watched this show for the first time last year with my ex and re-experiencing certain parts of it brought me right back to the brown couch I have on my first floor where we snuggled up under a blanket with the lights off and watched together. We binged about half of the season in one dreary afternoon right before we loaded up the cute Lego table I had made for his nephew’s birthday to take over to his brother’s house. As we were watching, the windy weather outside kept making the ‘Welcome’ sign that hangs on my front door smack against the glass, causing us to jump a bit more often from the startling sound. A few days earlier, he had come over on a ‘school night’ to help me build a little (disproportionate) Lego town for the little one. While carrying the Lego table to the car, I dropped the little spare tire we had placed in the back of the Lego pick-up truck that Josh built while we were watching the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We brought the table to the birthday boy and watched as he and his sister tore it apart in glee. I got a text the next morning that the kids ran straight to that Lego table as soon as they woke up the next morning and I felt really happy. I felt like I was part of a family.

Three days later, everything fell apart. I fell apart. Some things that felt important to me at that time were stripped away from me – the man I loved, the pseudo-family I had nearby, the kids I loved to spoil who reminded me so much of my own niece and nephew, my scary movie buddy, dreary October afternoons spent with someone instead of missing someone. I had gained all of these things in the Fall and lost them all in the Fall, and something about the weather and spooky signs and pumpkin-spiced mania keeps giving me flashbacks to the beginning and the end. I keep reliving the high-highs and the lowest of lows. I think about the October afternoon we spent building Marvel Legos in my living room and he was looking for a certain Lego and said “Am I blind?” and I said “No, darlin’ you’re just stupid” and we giggled about that for the rest of the weekend. I think about the time I gave him strep throat with a smooch in the parking lot of a Wendys just a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, the time we drove around Northern Virginia looking at Fall leaves, the time I visited my family for a week over Halloween and came home to someone who couldn’t wait to see me when I got back and surprised me with Super Mario themed refrigerator magnets. Then I think about the trip we never took to Oktoberfest at Busch Gardens, which I had planned meticulously in a state of optimism and denial. I think about the Halloween costumes I bought that we still wore even though my Pikachu makeup was ruined by break-up tears by the end of the night, and the time I went on a run to try to keep my sanity and found that Lego spare tire on the street – and the way I cried on a stoop just staring at it in the palm of my hand. I think about how much courage it took for me to finish watching the rest of The Haunting of Hill House by myself after he left, and how I felt sad 100% percent of the time and scared 0% of the time. I think about how the time we delivered that Lego table to the kids was the last time I’ll ever see them.

It’s like this time in my life was bookended by two Fall seasons – the happiest one and the saddest one – and I’m haunted by both of them right now. In between the two bookends was a short lived romance in which I spent a lot of time wondering if my partner even liked me and knowing for sure that he didn’t love me. I kept trying to be someone worth being loved by him. I kept trying to be the best girlfriend ever. I never gave up on it until he made me give up on it. I know everything in between my two Fall bookends wasn’t great, and I’m way better off now that the story has ended. I wish the entire story really was something sitting on a shelf – novels in between bookends that I could scoop up and toss into a donation box. I wish I could take them to the used bookstore or the Goodwill and place them somewhere where they can still exist but be far away from me – far enough away that they won’t haunt me anymore. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with this writing. Maybe I’m trying to take these stories and offload them from my own bookshelf and onto yours, so you can enjoy them and I can declutter my head at the same time. Maybe you can soak them in and I can stop being haunted by them. And one day when I’m ready, I can find the new shelf that my stories sit on and read them again without pain or regret. Does that make sense? I want all of these ghosts to go away (the good ones and the bad ones) but I don’t want a Ghostbusters situation where they end up in one of those traps forever. They are memories worth having and I don’t have any regrets. I just wish I could take a break from them.

I guess there’s nothing unique here. It’s pretty common for people to have feelings of grief or miss someone during the Holidays. I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the ladies hosting said that Halloween is millennial Christmas. In my case, I feel like that might be true. I’ve always thought Halloween is like the Friday afternoon of the Holiday season. Friday afternoon is when the work week is winding down and everything feels good and tingly because you know you’re only hours away from enjoying the weekend. The rest of the weekend just doesn’t feel as good. Saturday you realize that the weekend is halfway over already, Sunday you start to dread the start of the new week. Friday afternoon is really the only part of the weekend that feels like stress-free relief and anticipation. Halloween is like that – it’s the signal that wonderful things are coming and that you better pay attention and enjoy it, because you’ll blink and it will be another gray January.

So yeah. I’m at the best part of the Holiday season and I’m missing someone – or maybe the idea of someone, and memories are making me feel things. I’m also recognizing that this Holiday season will be another lonely one for me. No one is coming and I’ll be putting my tree up by myself again, and watching Christmas movies and the Holiday Baking Championship on the Food Network alone, and counting the days until I can load up the 4runner to retreat to my family in Kentucky for a few days. For a couple of weeks, it’s been a little difficult to get into the spirit because of that. I was hoping I’d be visited by three actual ghosts in A Christmas Carol form – the ghosts of Halloween Past, Halloween Present, and Halloween Future – to teach me how to keep Halloween in my heart all year, but they haven’t arrived yet (and Roseanne already did that bit in the 90’s). The only cure for memories that haunt (other than writing them down) is to try to take back the places and times that hold those memories and paint new memories over top of them. Now my job is to take the wonderful memories of Fall 2020 and the ugly ones from Fall 2021, and forge shiny new ones over top of them. Maudie and I have Halloween costumes in the mail as we speak, and I’m planning to take her to pick a pumpkin soon. We’ll watch Casper and Hocus Pocus and I’ll carve a pumpkin while she stares at me and begs me for food. Step by step, we’ll exorcize the ghosts of Falls past right out of this house, and before long the memories will haunt me no more.