Haunting a Home
a short essay about change, ghosts, and becoming more than you needed
I have moved into my new home.
It is mine, this home is mine, and it feels oh so strange to be able to announce this. These walls are a constant reminder of the safe space I will come to create.
I still have this feeling, though, one I had when turned 16, 18, and 21 (and now soon 25); it doesn’t feel like this should have happened. This isn’t meant for me, in a weird way. It’s a form of imposter syndrome. It isn’t that I thought I wasn’t going to live to those ages, or that I was going to “unalive” myself before then. I just hadn’t thought of myself as encompassing those stages of my life. It’s as if I have stepped into a ghost. I can’t envision myself as being 16, 18 or 21. Who would I be? How different would I become?
Maybe it is because I am not a goal driven person. Hitting those achievements, or ages, didn’t feel as important as when I first learned to drive, or when I did well on an exam, or when I was hired for my first job. Maybe it is because these achievements have some sense of “impressing” others. They fulfil the social expectations and norms of what it means to be a person, and so having accomplished them, I become a person. How sad it is I think in this way, huh? On the other side of the same coin, however, this line of thinking is interesting, right? What about the way I envision myself leads me down the path to separate the “I” that sits across from me, the one I see myself as, but also the one in the chair looking at “I”? Do I stare at the ghost of me, haunting myself, unable to be either?
It reminds me of a conversation I’ve had a few times with my partner and sister, where I’ve talked about how, over the past few years, I haven’t really felt like “a person”. I feel as if I am floating in this skin, suspended, puppeteering the strings of my arms and legs and mind to fulfil the tasks of the day, and the goals expected of me designated by my peers, of those I respect or with authority. Yet, I am not fulfilled in doing those things given to me. I think I convinced myself that that was the case, however. If I make those around me happy, if I make them smile, I would be infected with the happiness disease and smile alongside them, and thus we could all share in its encompassing warmth. Yet, I turned 16 and felt nothing. Since then, I’ve drifted in and out of milestones unable to feel the body I am haunting.
When I was 16, I was changing. Maybe it was this stage where I was ‘becoming’. I was beginning to carve out the music I liked, watch movies that others didn’t because the one’s in the cinemas were too predictable or boring. The same was true for books. I wanted to read something with an edge, or something that cleaved me open and put my soul to rest. I wanted to feel different at that stage. I wanted to feel something altogether. Yet I was roiling in two houses full of noise, having been shunted into them from places I had called home since I was young, forced into the cramped spaces of both my grandmothers’ houses: on my mum’s side, we lived in Maman’s house with her and my mum’s brother, who was a struggling addict and drug-induced schizophrenic, all the while my own mum dealt with her problems with alcohol and medication addiction, searching for acceptance in the eyes of others; on my dad’s side, we lived on his mum’s property in a caravan we made stationary, ever changing with the annex, with people and partner’s, while the paper thin walls screamed at the pain they were caused by hardened fists and broken dinner plates.
The year I turned 16, I suffered a great loss. I quickly accepted that my reality for the rest of my life was motherless. Two months after she took her life, I had my first job. I can’t help but think fondly about the memory I could have made, of her driving me to work, a secret smile plastered beneath the mole above her lip, her tower of curly hair bouncing as the car inches closer to our destination, her lonely heart singing at her son slowly becoming real, slowly becoming someone. The same goes for when I graduated, or when I was accepted into university (the first of my lot to do so), and when I was accepted for a master’s to write a thesis. Now, I must hold the hand of a boy who wished for these things, who haunts these daydreams to feel real again, wiping his small soft tears because we can only really make ourselves proud now. You can tell me she looks down on me with a smile, from up in the clouds, or in heaven, or the afterlife, but I can’t help but want for the weight of her person to walk through that door once more, wordless, with open arms.
Maybe it was me that placed too much on the idea of being 16. Maybe, now, I feel as if the ‘good’ years were robbed from me. Maybe I hadn’t ever really felt like I was 16 to begin with. Maybe it’s because I felt as if I were surviving; home; school; parents; friends; myself. Maybe. Maybe. I’ll never really know.
The same goes for when I turned 18. At that stage, I still hadn’t gotten my licence. I was in year 12 and was busy carving myself out from stone. I studied the arts mainly, and I did well at prints of etches in art class, woodcuts and the like, while also achieving high grades in English and Literature. I was reading a lot around the era of post-modernism, of the fall of the human soul post-world war II. I began reading a lot of Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Kahlil Gibran, falling in love with the art of Giacometti and Goya, all the while, attributing the suffering I felt as part of life. It taught me if I were to give this meaningless suffering a meaning, I’d be happy. Everything around me still felt vacuous though. Hollow. I don’t attribute every bit of pain to the loss of my mother. At the time, my Dad was also struggling. He lost the mother of his kids and had to raise myself and my sister all on his own suddenly. Granted, my sister and I were becoming more independent, but he receded slowly over the years to being a loner. A Lupus diagnosis some 10 years prior cordoned off his want for life, especially after a horrible run-in with a bad partner. He took his frustration out on the world around him, blamed it for the way that things turned out, whilst he had all the autonomy to make the changes he needed. It was hard seeing this frustration. You saw the signs in the walls, in his voice, in his heavy sighs, in the way he fell in and out of his chair, and in his eyes that searched in his children’s for recognition of a job well done when he cooked dinner every night. But I see him, a hugs-length from me, swallowed up in his broken leather chair, and I can’t help but miss my Dad.
Again, I don’t attribute all my pain to my parents. But I saw his complacency, his struggle with change, and when I changed, I felt nothing. When things changed, I felt something. It was vicious and hard. Sharp and unrelenting. Part of being a person is being an agent of change. And I felt so much change so quickly, that agency felt like a responsibility for others to manage. And all I wanted was some sense of peace. I think change haunts me in some way. It is around every corner, and has been for some time, wishing to disrupt the peace and silence I had been trying to cultivate in world of chaos. Yet, the change is needed. I can’t be a ghost in my own life.
21. We had recently come out of COVID-19 lockdowns. I finally had my licence. Everyone was out, trying to socialise, to feel the push and pull of what it means to connect with people. I’d been with my partner for some time, I was going to the gym regularly, I was doing well at university and corresponding back and forth with tutors on what to do and how to scale the ranks of academia. It was this year, I believe, that I finally received the money stashed away in a trust from my mother’s death. The number was bigger than anything I had seen before. And to a twenty-something, it was everything. When I had mentioned it to people, the eyes on their face lit up and they saw the potential of what could be done with how much I had. I am not that way inclined, however. I’ve never really wished to invest, to own a business, or increase my wealth. No amount of money could outweigh the life that replaced it. It felt like a burden. I didn’t want it. But I couldn’t get rid of it. I wanted to make sure that I did right by what was given to me, though, and so, three years later, I bought a house.
No other decision in my life has encompassed that much change, other than maybe cutting the long hair I had been growing since my mum had passed. It all felt right. I can be here, in my house, without guilt or shame. My shoulders can fall, my brow can un-furrow, the stones in my chest can fall down.
These walls will know no fist, no scream or scratch.
They will know music, laughter and peace.
I will build a cairn here with the stones that fall from me.
I will honour you here by making this house a home.
I will haunt my home.