Ghost Story

I. Camera Obscura

The picture is cold. You know how an object can be colder than another object at the same temperature? Below zero, yes. I shake the photo. The strands tremble, and with a little prodding, the sand begins to fill around my feet, a sempiternal, non-gravitational hourglass. The people in it start to move and I taste salt in the air, ephemeral whitecaps fizzing in and out of existence. Even under the sheet, I feel how cold this day is-- but there are two sources of heat, and it is this that I turn my attention to. I blink, and the people begin to move. I only recognize one of them.

II. Adjust Aperture

The shoot diaphragm, a nine-blade iris, moves like sharks, each swimming through a sea of metal like it was oil. Each one glitters, a microscopic sliver of the sun. The lens flare is pixelated, turning sea into sky. The scene luminance was minimal, except for two lone stars. A binary star system, that’s what a physicists would call it. Gravity, the quantifiable, particle physics description of love-- it’s everywhere in the photograph. It weighs me down, makes the sheet that would otherwise loft into the air settle near the ground, the body underneath skeletal. The camera scintillates, hardened quicksilver that stays well out of the way of the flash sync terminal. No electrons travel there now; there is no flash, no miniature explosion of a lightbulb.

III. Strands

I watch as the child, infantile, the color of the Moon, plays. There is a hole, there, next to them. What’s it for? I couldn’t tell you. Digging holes, then bridging them together with tunnels, maybe, most likely in fact. I have to remember so many lifetimes at once, piece them together-- well, never mind. This is raw, this is unedited, curated or calculated, and I must say I smile as I see the utter confused joy on the child’s face. They’re happy, but it’s clear from the hat they’re windblown, at least on the inside. All I can see, oh Mother, all I can see is love.

IV. Silence

You can almost see the glass that makes the waves. At least-- you can see it when it breaks, fragments over the beach, turning golden sands into broken stained glass windows. The child looks away, almost as if the love goes unacknowledged. And that’s the saddest thing, isn’t it? Unacknowledgement? Do not worry, ghosts do no harm, they are used to being unacknowledged. We normalize it, and that scares me. But here, no, it’s not that. It’s merely a child, insatiably curious, stuck peering through a keyhole. My mother doesn’t see it.

V. Frost

In this photo, yes, I’m probably cold. California gives you a chill, one that I am still not rid of. There is one thing that makes the Californian ice melt. You know love, that head-over-heels, sucker punch feeling? My mother and I, we share it, cultivate it. Nipping even a bud, even so a beautiful chrysanthemum can bloom, hurts more than lightning. I try and let go as the shutter is released.

VI. Ghost Story

The sea spills out of the frame, the sands swirl around, golden stardust. In the background of the frame, I can see a white sheet fluttering, like one of those ghosts kids dress up as for Halloween. A benign spirit, that’s what a pagan would call it. The same deep, dark eyes, those eyes filled with violent emotion, that crazed bit of green shining, that fills the faces of those in the frame, you can see it behind them. You can’t? Look harder. You’ll see me, the little ghost, behind there. In the waves, the hills, every little granule and pixel, a little ghost with two piercing eyes and a bedsheet-white body, windblown. It’s a note to self, a ghost story I never realized was there until I myself was the phantom.