My Queer History: “Ghost”
This essay is part of a series that explores my personal history of queerness through the songs of the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Sailers. For details on the project and links to all of the essays, check out this introduction: “My Queer History: Me and the Indigo Girls.”
I have kept the sky-blue envelope and two-page letter for 33 years, moved it from house to house, over hundreds of miles, a marriage, a daughter, multiple careers and jobs. The memory is a pinprick to my heart,* and so I searched for it recently, finding it in a box in the basement. Immediately, I recognized his careful but clumsy handwriting.
Ghosts are tricky things, invisible but not, sending messages from the past, as we maneuver the present. As a little girl, I believed that our house had a ghost. We called her Mrs. Ribble, the name of the woman for whom the house was built. She died a young wife, thrown to the ground violently, when her horse was frightened by a train. One moment she was alive and the next she was gone, a tragic accident, but because we thought we saw her brief shadows, the train of her dress dragging on the floor as she moved from room to room, she stayed among the living.
But of course, the living can be ghosts, too. Memories serve to keep past loves young and sad, stuck in moments of grief or cruelty.
Our breakup had been sudden for him, unexpected. In those months of silence, between the end and his letter, in that fall of our Sophomore year of college, I had heard he was partying: drinking from handles of Jim Beam, raucously singing his college fight song at football games, his grief exposed in testosterone-filled rages, the inverse of the reserved person I knew. These second-hand stories enflamed my guilt in a way that only small-town rumors and gossip could. It is difficult to convey the seriousness of our plans; even in adolescence, we were certain to grow old together. In my leaving, I had muted myself, had not told him the whole truth: I wasn’t who we thought I was.
“I wanted to let you know I had been thinking of you, wondering how you are doing.” He wrote in cursive, placed the date at the top right corner of the first page, skipped “Dear” but closed with “Love.” He mentions her by name, but only to ask if she and I were rooming together. The rumors about me hadn’t begun to spread.
“I guess we just didn’t stand the test of time.” But I knew time was not the problem. His vague assessment of our separation is painful to read. He doesn’t say he misses me but that he misses us. And I could not tell him the truth — that I missed that sense of security, too — because the whole truth was terrifying. I left him because I loved her. I abandoned the expected for the unexpected, and this had felt both impulsive and the answer to questions I had never expressed. How could I express these things to him?
Letters are ghosts, not diary entries but shared experiences, threads that connect people across distances and eventually time. The sender remains frozen, forever tied to the words written on the page, and the words are proof of existence, even when memory has turned the past into something unrecognizable but necessary. I’ve bent the truth in my mind, exaggerated and shrunk it, in an attempt to explain or guiltily cling to the damage I believe I left behind me.
“At times I regret not having you to turn to or be with.” Of all my demon spirits,* my regret — forged of what could have been — feels the most necessary. There are times when my heart is still stuck in the summer and fall of 1987, when I had to break something I cherished so that I could be myself, when I chose to amputate one love so that I could become whole with another. He wrote a kind letter in an attempt to connect, but I ignored him because I was too afraid, too fragile to face everything at once. In that decision — to which I have remained loyal — he and we became ghosts, frozen in time and circumstance, damned to live between the past and present. I still love that ghost of him, that ghost of us, which would have been so much simpler and perhaps less painful, except for who I am.
*Lyrics from The Indigo Girls’ “Ghost,” Rites of Passage, 1992, by Emily Saliers
More from this series:
My Queer History: “Burn All the Letters”
My Queer History: “Dirt and Dead Ends”
