Shadows of remembered past

By Mark Morgan

A ghost walks across my grave. She is very young, and very attractive. Flighty. Friendly. I look at her while she works and nine months slide away. I am looking at another young woman on a windy day, sharing a coat.

I do not understand love, really. Assuming I can say such a thing, I am in love, but not with this girl. With another. But I sit at work and watch this girl and suddenly she is not her, she is another. An old pain refuses to surface. But a ghost walks across my grave.

A friend once asked me, "What do you think about?" I daydream. Perhaps in modern education they would have fed me amphetamines to get me to pay attention. Very little in life requires my full attention. I daydream. I am the hero, rescuing the damsel. Wearing my armor, wielding my sword; wearing my leather jacket, riding my motorcycle; dressed casually, weilding death with my bare hands. I am the hero, the rescuer, the savior.

Most children share those daydreams, to a greater or a lesser extent. Most keep them as daydreams. I made it my life. Hero, rescuer, I can make your life better. I can save you from yourself.

Enola, come live with me and be my love. I'll make everything right. I'll get it together, we'll move out, your son can live with us. I can make everything alright. I will save the day. I can save you from yourself.

What fools we make of ourselves, for love. For five months I dreamed that dream, that I could save her from herself. I do not believe she had any such foolish illusions. Even now, attempting to make sense of that time is impossible at best and useless in result. I no longer care about yesterday. Yesterday permanently no longer exists. "The past is history, the future is a mystery, right now is a gift."

But I sit at work, and I watch her. And don't see her, but see another. I tell a simple truth to others, which is also a simple lie. "Thank God I'm not in that relationship any more." Five months of raging doubt and insecurity. The hero did not rescue the damsel. The damsel left. The world stubbornly move around the sun, the sun along the arm of the galaxy, the galaxy out from the original big one.

A ghost walks across my grave. And for a moment, only a moment, the hero peeks out. I think of rescues. Of stormings of castle. I open the cabinet in my mind and look at the sword and the armor and the motorcyle and the leather and all the other fantasies.

In the end, do we really do anything that affects anyone at all, except by mere chance?

And I close the cabinet. And I dream. Of one who kept me company on the cold nights. Who refuses to indulge my self-obsessiveness. Who sees not the beauty of herself, so that it is my job to see that beauty. Who, but just being, invades my dreams.

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