Sunday, September 10, 2006

second haunting - visitations

A normal childhood?

It is hard to explain the extraordinary things which have happened in my life. For the most part I had a normal childhood; friends, pets, tree houses, and porch swing conversations watching the older kids cruise up and down the boulevard. That is where normal stayed.

Behind closed doors

The ghosts often came at night; jingling thier angry chains and yelling from the livingroom as to reach my little t-shaped roof room at the top of the stairs. It wasn't loud. It was muffled, a slithering sound, often shaped with jagged teeth and showering me with mental images I did not understand.

Nature speaks

For a long while I ignored these things, save when my grandmother looked me square in the eye and said I had the gift of sight, and I said my parents were going to divorce. I was nine. I never forgot her look. I never lost the sight. In the summer of my 13th year, my words came true. I remember wondering if the trees knew before I did. Looking up they nodded, and whispered I was like them. I cried.

The Death Card

It was the death of my childhood. It was the death of being a girl in a t shaped room with ghosts in the closets and sharp teethed shadows. Now I would be haunted by a much different thing, my own sense of the world as portrayed through the failures of others. In the beginning it would be the tears of my father. Then it would be visitation rights performed sequentially and faithfully on holidays and summers. And the ghosts rattling thier chains would follow me... for nearly a 1/4 of a century. Only then would death give up its grip and release me to yet another haunting. This one no fool but full of lovers.