as long as there's been something in the corner of your eye

A half hour ago I finished watching Ghost Hunters. I sat my snarky self down on the love seat and subjected my poor roommate to all my esoteric commentary about the show, filling in the gaps with my own silly stories… and then hushing the conversation the second the commercial ended. Contradiction in terms, much? Yes.

I’m not going to dispute the presence of something other there. I had a few experiences… late at night… sleep deprived… that made my hairs stand on end. But I won’t deny there was some element of validation in that show describing footsteps in the Great Hall… as I swear I heard those footsteps once in the still of a sleeping Overknight whilst I was typing away on my computer. But I was probably jacked up on Diet Coke and my fourth wind after working a full week and commuting to a full courseload in Cambridge. Whatever.

I brushed it off then. Because, honestly, I was more scared of not having enough money in my bank account to pay rent from that job… or not having enough bread bowls to feed 75 cub scouts and their fathers at the next Overknight. Besides, Higgins is on top of one of the windier hills in Worcester, with very limited barriers. The temperature change in that building makes the metals and wood and other supportive materials of the structure creak. Especially when that train rattles by at 3 in the morning. Or the heat turns on and hisses through the baseboards in the middle of the day. It could be… anything …

But… if you’ve read half the posts I’ve written about Beauport, you might have an inkling that I am less resolute in my doubt these days. I won’t say with a certainty what any of it is… just that I do believe there is more on this earth than I can explain with my limited awareness of what is… especially relative to that after death thing.

One thing I can say with certainty is how emotion lingers in the air… even when the people in it leave the space. Call it energy. Call it vibes. Call it whatever… I don’t think I’m too off my rocker when I state this. I experience it whenever I walk into an empty theater. It is one thing I can say with certainty about Beauport. I’ve walked into a room feeling perfectly content, then suddenly have the urge to cry sentimentally over my friends. Or… there are definitely days when that house sings with readiness for a party. Call it what you will… something lingers…

Maybe I choose to linger on this notion because of the current fiction I’m trying to piece together. It (not completely unlike my last novel) has a house as a centerpiece… a binding element to three stories. And in that house something lingers. Maybe a memory, but I’ve decided not all the characters share the memory. But they will feel the shadow of the thing that was experienced. The echo of another person’s heart will vibrate in their own…

And maybe that isn’t entirely coincidence. Maybe it is my own weird way of looking at the world, trying to join together this dopey SyFy (what the hell name is that for a network) show, the start of my Beauport season, writing… and my own frustrated attempts to resolve some unsolved emotion. Because… it does linger. In the air between other people. In our bodies. In our thinking… when things don’t find a peace they don’t go away. And maybe that is the horse actually in front of the cart that way... none of this invisible energy stuff. But… I don’t know… maybe we get these glimmers of things stuck in the air to remind us to make the peace in our present lives, so we aren’t haunted by the ghosts of ourselves.