The Ghosts of July

ISSUE #112

My house is haunted. There are rooms I cannot enter, and every night I speak with ghosts. We bicker in the shower and argue at the cutting board. Their forms vary, appearing sometimes as others and sometimes myself, come to resurrect some buried humiliation from my past. The one thing that dispels them is the sound of my voice: "Now I’m so lonely I talk to the walls and sing to the ceiling."¹

Ghosts are real, and I'm not here to deliberate their existence. We're haunted by all the things we remember, which appear unbidden as thoughts and dreams. Buildings hold memories, built by hand and humming with decades of routine, like bodies that shudder with ripples of past injury. Nabokov once put it as this: "When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object."²

Further, the entire country is full of ghosts. As we approach the Fourth in this most cursed of years, it's important to see America for what it is: the most haunted land in the world. "Our country's ghost stories are themselves the dreams (or nightmares) of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities: uncomfortable and unbidden expressions of things we'd assumed were long past and no longer important [...] the history of America's ghost stories is one of crimes left unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about."³ The Fourth of July has long felt gratuitous. Why are we surprised the spirits are now angry?

Our minds are structured as palaces of memory, and every trauma has its proper room. There are doors in there I also refuse to open, painted shut with a coat of pale grief. But you can't just renovate and expect the ghosts to vanish. You either open those doors and confront the wailing, or you burn it all down and salt the earth.