Peepshow

Mar 26, 2008 - 12:40 PM PST

Sometimes late at night I wander the house, eyes closed, and pretend I’m drifting down the dark hallways. I like to scratch at the walls and doorways, moan into the stairwells, mope in lone rocking chairs . . . I imagine I’m a ghost of some sort, haunting my house, abandoned years and years ago . . . So I wonder, what kind of ghost stories would they tell of me?

I suppose the anonymity of ghosts are what draws me to their misty lives. Nameless, people assign them the lives and characters they see fit. I’d like to be the Green Lady, once in love with a man of pauperdom, but forcibly wed instead to a man with a considerable fortune. They found me hanged to death on my honey moon with crumpled dollar bills stuffed into my mouth and my pauper’s name written onto my lips, and now I haunt all newly married rich couples.

Sometimes I think I’d accomplish more if I had that freedom to live as a legend, under the creaky wood planks and the clanks of the pipes, as the shadows in the corners of eyes, walking through the walls and through the lives of people still wandering their haunted halls as I do, searching for meaning -- searching for me.