Epistle

First posted November 2019.

Do not weep for us. Our story is not a tragedy, though you would be forgiven for expecting it to be. If I say I’m going to tell you a ghost story, you expect a violent murder, a gruesome horror, star-crossed lovers, one-sided romance, a great rise, a crushing fall. I think perhaps that is why we stay--as a reminder that the world is just as full of light as it is dark.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

There has never been a moment without her that I remember; surely those moments must have existed, but they were and are of no consequence. We were children together, before anything else. We ran barefoot through dense woods to the music of birdsong, our feet pricked and scraped by the dried pine needles of the forest floor. Warm sunlight stretched its fingers through the bristly treetops, brushing our faces as we laughed. I tripped on a tree root and cut my knee. She knelt at my side to tend to my wounds, and I gasped when she touched me, and I didn’t know why. We held elaborate weddings for our china dolls. The brides wore white, day after day.

We went to school together, and she learned about history and mathematics and biology and literature, and I learned the way the colour of her hair changed when the sun shone through our classroom window and how the corner of her mouth pulled into a smile when she discovered the answer to a problem. She shook her head in exasperation when she asked what I thought about something discussed in class and I said I hadn’t been listening. When she tried to explain it to me again, I learned how many freckles were on her face and how lights danced in her eyes.

We grew older, and when my father passed away this house passed to me. It might as well have passed to her, the way she immediately took it upon herself to redecorate--but in a way, I suppose it did. Gone were the dark damask drapes in my father’s study, gone were the glowering marble busts from the parlour’s mantel. Like a benevolent Midas, she turned every room into a gleaming, glittering, golden dream. I moved into the master bedroom, which she decorated in yellow and pine green. I thought it an odd combination and asked her why she chose those colours. She replied, smiling, that it reminded her of sunshine in the trees, which made her think of me. I kissed her then, for the first time, but by no means the last.

I pursued no greater goal than loving her. I had no dreams for the wide world. Perhaps it was simple or selfish of me. I stop myself from saying that it would have made no difference if I had tried to achieve something; there are innumerable small ways in which I could have affected the lives of others for good or evil, and ways that I must have made a difference unknown to me. One sees it all from this side: the spider-silk-thin threads that tie us all to one another.

I grew ill, as women in that time often did. This would be the pivotal point I remember from the ghost stories I was told growing up: the great tragedy that tears lovers apart. It must have seemed so to us, too, at the time; I see it now as the first step toward something greater. I have seen, from this side, those threads disappear as a soul leaves its earthly form, and I have seen them remain. The threads between her and I--so numerous and strong as to appear more like rope than thread--remained, and thus, so did I.

She looked so beautiful in black, like a living Greek marble draped in mourning cloth. I told her so, and she was not frightened when she heard me. She was content to stay in the house as long as I was there, and I was content to stay as long as she stayed. It would not be precisely correct to say we lived together; she lived, and I lingered, and we were together.

The threads remained; the threads remain. I do not know how long it took her to join me, but time is not, and was not, of consequence. I know nothing of a life beyond this one; some souls depart, but where they go, I could not say, nor do I have much interest. She is here, and I have no desire to be somewhere she is not.

One expects ghosts to be or have been of some monumental significance: history-changers, warning signs of humanity’s horrors, victims of some disastrous tragedy told in hushed tones throughout the world. We have no horror to share, no warnings to impart; we were simply two women who lived in love, happily and without strife. But is that not of monumental significance? Are not simple, joyous, loving lives worth as much as great tragedies?

Do not weep for us. We made no scientific discoveries, nor technological wonders, nor art that improves the lives of humankind; but we were, and are, happy, and it is in small acts such as this that the darkness is kept at bay.