It’s just like home. The sun didn’t set, the gray and the wet just darkened, colors lost their definition except for the glow within. I used to live here. This is the place I meant when I said just like home; it’s a bit like dying when you leave a place long enough and far enough behind. No matter how solid you are if you come back you’re just a wayward spirit passing through a used to be as a once was.
If you stay someplace long enough you’ll hear the same joke, a self-deprecating about being a local. Some stranger asks directions and the punch line is something like “… and you take a right at where Potters Oak used to stand …” It’s not so funny when it’s your last frame of reference.
I went to where the bush of ghosts used to be. I didn’t know until years later that the phrase was a thing in other cultures. I researched it enough to make sure that my bush of ghosts was mine. It had meaning to me because it was my secret; if it was real, if I was only channeling the psychic sub conscious unity of man my bush of ghosts would have lost all meaning.
I had a dream once, a year after I had first seen the bush of ghosts for what it was. In the dream I was dead and inside the bush, just inside the outer cluster of needles, looking out. Sometimes another would stand next to me and make a sound like rain through a screen door or a small blue egg falling from a woven nest in a maple tree. You saw your loved ones, impossibly walking down the short street; the bush of ghosts was right where the street bent southward and northward was twenty feet of cul de sac. The living were drawn to this little neighborhood where the bush grew looking just a bush, and they grieved as they walked, perhaps not knowing why.
I’ve never been dead or if I have I can’t recall. I don’t want to discuss abortion, ever, unless I have too, but there is an interesting adjunct to the idiot argument of when life begins; do we not begin dead? Yes, an argument could be made that not alive is distinct from dead; I don’t care. My interest would be that somewhere in our memory both reside; not alive and dead.
Here it feels like I walk somewhere between the two. Here, too, is my first memory of death, likely the only one I get to keep. There is a duplex where there was a bush of ghosts. From the inside I imagine it looks the same. The bush of ghosts, that bush of ghosts, my bush of ghosts, might belong solely to me but death is something we share. I feel like the living, I walk down that street, impossibly, and grieve for something that no longer exists. I can tell you how to get there. Just go down the street where Joe used to live, take a right on Ann and stop when you get to where the bush of ghosts used to be.
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