…Neighbors

Our neighbors are gone. The house his great grandfather built, where his family lived for over 100 years is empty. It’s haunting and sad to see.

And something about seeing it speaks to my soul. Speaks to my spirit. I also watched an interview with David Pitts… He seemed…reticent. Peculiarly so. And I think he worries about the book he wrote.

What if I know some dead better than most of the living? What if I’m not just hearing demons? What if I’m talking to actual ghosts? …What if I’m not unlovable?

Once, years ago, I watched an interview on some news station with Bobby Kennedy Jr. after they’d found very personal passages in his diary. He looked miserable. And right before they cut to a commercial I felt like I could read his mind. *laugh* He wanted to apologize. He felt morbidly embarrassed. …And when they came back to him he did exactly as I thought he would. Spoke the thoughts I’d “read on his face.” I’ve never met the man but…there was a particularly eerie quality to it all. And I wonder…can I escape it? What if it’s real? If I’d been born in 1918 would I have held him as a child? Would I have corrected him and almost brought him to tears? I can somehow see it. The “difficult” adult. …That uncool lady.

And then what?

I look at that house in the light of the eclipse and…I see my childhood. And it feels out of time. And almost as if I lived it with people who…died while I was child. Did they too play at the playground I did? No. But somehow it feels like they did. …Especially the folks in Minnesota.

I’m only 38. And I’m only me. …It’s shocking.

Or is it?! …We all belong somewhere. To someone. Someplace. And maybe… Maybe I know things. And almost nobody else does.

“I mean, you’ve talked to him. In person. You’ve talked to his ghost.” my ex-husband said to me the other day. As if it was real. As if it mattered. But more importantly as if I was being silly. Silly how? Silly in thinking I wouldn’t automatically know more. As if it was common sense. The most obvious thing. As if I actually know some of these people… And I can’t handle it. I just can’t. I don’t want to stop talking to them unless God wants me to, and I’m not sure I have much choice anyway. But…I can’t handle the reality of it combined with the reality of the rest of it. I can meld them together. Fall in love. Be sincere. But…I can’t fathom that it’s…real.

It’s profound cognitive dissonance. And I can see it. But it’s my love of truth and science and accuracy and love and goodness and God that makes it so difficult. How can I possibly be me? I am. But golly, what will anyone make of it?

The house next door is comforting.