Ghost stories

If you were a ghost, you could follow me as I went shopping. We’d go to all your favorite stores: Barney’s, Mario’s, Kenneth Cole. I would hold things up for your approval, show you the latest styles, and you could sneer at them or ooh and aah, and no one else would know. I would laugh at your jokes and tell you stories, and everyone would think I was either crazy or talking on a wireless headset for my cell phone.

We would stop at a Starbucks and rest, even though you didn’t need it. I’d buy an extra tea in your honor that would sit across the table from me, untouched, and I would leave it there, because you never finished your teas, either. No one else would want to drink it, since you always put too much sugar in it. We would gripe about the state of the world, my job, our family, just for old time’s sake. I wouldn’t want you to feel like you didn’t belong.

You would tell me what to buy, and we’d smell soaps, perfume sprayed into your ghostly space, and I would put lotion on and offer it to you to smell. You liked the citrus scents the best. You could look at and smell all those things I bought you the last Christmas and birthday, the things you never took out of the packages because you were too sick.

Afterward we could stop at Palomino like always, and I’d pull up a chair in the bar, just for you. Bread pudding to share, and hot alcoholic drinks. I would put my feet up in the chair and tell you how much I miss you. There would hardly be any bags this time, because you are not really here to buy all those items we never needed, but always wanted.

As a ghost, you would still be practical, and bossy, and sharp. But you couldn’t slap my arm and I couldn’t step on your heels. The rain wouldn’t make you cranky and you would just tell me to suck it up when I complained that I was cold and wet. You would no longer be cold, would you? So, the world would be more pleasant. Except that you are gone.

But you would never feel sorry for yourself that you couldn’t try on those 7 For All Mankind jeans or that Me and Ro necklace I wanted to buy you. Well, maybe sometimes you would look away in your ghostly shimmer, and I would know that you missed this life -- the cold and the rain and the tea and the sore feet and the pressure of the holiday, and the one time each year we got to be twins and rediscover what we shared.

I want there to be ghosts, I want spirits of the dead to be real. I want to feel a breeze sweep over my hand that I know to be your touch, or see you as something fleeting and glowing out of the corner of my eye. But wanting doesn’t make it so, and ghosts elude me. It would not be the same if you were a ghost, even though you would be here next to me, inside me.