Ghosted in October? How festive!

Character development, baby

Disappear, verb: to vanish, to cease to be present, from the late middle English dis-, expressing reversal or a turnaround, on the pattern of the French disparaître. An appearance reversed; enter, then exit, Irish exit. O’Kay then. Stand up from the metaphorical table mid-conversation and dissipate into the ether, neither here nor there. Disappeared. No object permanence. Away from sight, and gone. Cease to exist.

It can be transitive, too. To disappear someone. As in, to make vanish, to make no longer visible, to render un-present. Once around, now not. Life might be easier if I were the kind of person who can make a person disappear from thought. But alas, I am made of poetry and adjectives for sunlight and cannot seem to stop weaving meaning from mist, and the missed. To me, things don’t disappear when they’re not around. They linger. Some people can do a disappearing, though. Take aim and fire and plow right through the problem. Or avoid it altogether, I guess. Hot and cold, on and off. Open a book and toss it aside before you even get through an eighth of the exposition. If you’re into reading books, that is, but apparently it’s not everyone’s cup of metaphorical tea. Or decaf espresso.

Listen. Forgive my dramatic free association. I do not have a grid-matrix, black-and-white, math-and-science brain. I don’t see life as a series of things to be gotten through, problems to be engineered away, strategic operations that fulfill some violent but necessary end. Tick the boxes every day. A to B efficiency. Work out, work, eat, sleep, repeat? Nah, man. Fuck a straight line. I’m all about a good meander, and adventure, and pleasurable distraction, and doing things from scratch, and the gloaming beyond the riverboats in the mid-October evening. I’m about getting it wrong, and compassion, and communication, however inexpertly done, and words, and sometimes mincing them, if I feel like it, and sometimes even, if needs must, turning them as a weapon on that which causes me pain.

See? Words are balm, but bullets too. Though these will certainly dodge you.

Wounded, if only ‘tis but a scratch, I roll muddy through my manic litany of self-comfort mantras. No answer is an answer. If it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s a “hell no.” When one door closes, another one opens. You won’t be too much for the right person. Believe people when they show you who they are. Yeah, yeah. I know. All well and good. This isn’t a big deal. It isn’t even a little deal in the scheme of things. It still stings, though, which I can’t explain, since this particular wasp doesn’t even register a blip on the seismometer of my highly tectonic existence. Pray, excuse the mixed metaphors. I am a bit out of sorts.

If you see me on the bench by the river these days, reading Kahlil Gibran, muttering under my breath, just know I’m trying to work myself out of that place where I blame my own cringe instead of the disturbing lack of cringe of another. I am endeavoring to escape the cycle of self-deprecation, of arbitrary self-shrinkage on the self-sacrificing altar of the imagined other. Of possibility. Of absolutely losing my mind over a what-if future that was never going to exist and wouldn’t have worked for very long even if it did. Eternally putting the cart before the horse. Miles before the horse. Need to be my own horse sprinting sunward, cart be damned.

I always write in the singular hope that someone, somewhere, will read my words and feel less alone. So whoever you are, no matter how ghosted, I offer myself to your imagination. Nothing is truly wrong, not really, even if it’s not exactly right. But shake the dust. Unclench your jaw. Over and over the sun disappears and, reliably, appears again. Our star is no phantom. Over and over, the geese, those blessed constants, just keep on honking above the riverboats and bridges and that great muddy current. Every moment melts into the next. It’s only one moment. One season. And if there is one thing that lasts, it is the fact that seasons always pass.

PS: You can order a copy of the most recent issue of Catamaran, where my essay “Love and Other Birds” is published, at this link!