My Letter to a Ghost

I finally found the strength to open your book today. It is the book you left behind the last time I saw you. It is a paperback reminder of you, and it is weathered with your life. Your touch is all over it and, to look at it, it breaks my heart all over again.

A World of Ideas, and its grand compilation of insight and theories from thinkers like Ramachandran, Gould, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli; they spoke to you. And to me. I opened to a page full of your handwritten notes, and I instantly felt my heart beating again. I lifted the curling pages to my face, hoping to smell remnants of you, but you were gone—and sorrow welled in my throat. I traced the words you wrote in the columns, and visualized you writing. And I could feel so vividly the way it felt when you touched me.

When I close my eyes, I hear you voice: your speech pattern was palpable evidence of your thought process. The way you hesitated when your deepest thoughts took an extra second to come to order made me love you even more. The way the prophetic words rolled off your tongue in a visual parade of your intelligence was the most moving orchestra of art that I have ever witnessed.

You and your intelligence: the level at which your intuitive comprehension and brilliant perception functioned set you light years apart from everyone else, while simultaneously tormenting you as one of your deadliest demons.

But your gifted mind felt like home to me. And it was beautiful. When you spoke I felt the lobes of your mind swaddle me in their depth and safety. I recall the time we had to pull over to finish a conversation because it was too heavy to drive through. We had to stop moving-—be still while the Cainful world moved without order around us--— we analyzed the love theories of Schopenhauer.

Your mind was a fascinating world full of penetrating inspiration to me. My muse. I was so in love with you. Instantaneously. It was a crescendo of lifetimes spent searching for something then realized all at once in the moment I saw you. And that connection will last forever, immortally.

And now I have closed your book because I can only handle the pain in small doses. A suffering so debilitating and borne from an impossible longing to taste you again.

I am going to walk outside and breathe as deeply as I can today. I like to imagine that the air I inhale was recently exhaled by you just moments before. And so I ingest you.

But the sun looks guilty today, hiding behind the clouds in its overcast sky. It is as dirty and as depressed as I feel, but I understand. I remind myself that the heat emanating from behind its filth has been cast upon both you and me, and somehow I find comfort in the perversity of it all.

I miss you and your mind so much. Nothing will ever feel the same. I hope you are well. And I hope this is our final good-bye, so that I can move on.