Often, in a ghost story, former residents of a house will haunt its new owners.
If only life worked like stories.
In life, recently, I moved into a new house. House, indeed, is the proper word, for even tucked into blankets, protected from autumn’s first chill, I am far, far from Home.
In fact, it is me who has become the phantom. I am the midnight creeper, the sleepless ghoul who stalks downstairs to the refrigerator in darkness. I stand on old linoleum in the pale, chilly light of the Kenmore’s 40 watt bulb, slugging down store brand apple juice, straight from the massive jug, as if this will somehow drown the feeling. The feeling that I am the ghost; that I am haunting the home of my house’s former owners.
I sit at my keyboard in a room where the switchplate is pasted over with balloon and teddy bear stickers. I have taken to calling this place my office, but- at this point -who am I kidding? This is the baby’s room. Baby Lindsey. I even know her name. I’ve seen pictures. And the memory of Baby Lindsey crawling across this carpet feels like more of a certainty than my own feet on the carpet, under the desk, right now, in Lindsey’s room.
I want to break the tension, to yell “Boo!” But I have only myself to scare.
I thought my books would save me. By bringing a cast of thousands to keep me company, I thought I might fend off the strange loneliness that comes with living in an unfamiliar house, tangled thick with someone else’s roots. But in being packed and unpacked, my books were transformed. The walls of shelving that fortified me in my last apartment weakened me when I tore them down and reconstructed them. As I handled the individual volumes, I recognized their dominance. I have read less than half of the books I own. If I never acquire another new book in my lifetime and turn all my attention to those I already have, it’s unlikely I will finish reading them.
As I picked up each book, admired its jacket and read the dust cover copy, I not only spent twice as much time packing and unpacking as I’d planned for, but was drained of energy and pride as the books came to signify vast frontiers of the unknown. Now, unpacked again in my new house, I look at them as strangers more than friends. And I don’t seem to own them nearly as much as they possess me.
My house, already haunted by Lindsey and her parents, is now lined with cackling texts, chiding me about my inability to master them. This same malevolent taunting me that kept me from studying in the university library in my college days: That gothic palace crammed with books was, in many people’s estimation, a cathedral of knowledge. To me it was a temple of doom. “We know more than you ever will!” the halls screamed. And I retreated back to my dorm room, where I chose to forgo a social life and diligently read every page of every book assigned by my professors.
In college, moving twice each year, the first unboxing, the first setting-up, was always the stereo. It was as if placing speakers in the dormitory window, pushing PLAY and blasting Chaka Khan’s wail of “Ain’t Nobody” made you somebody. Out in the courtyard, all American youth flung Frisbees to the rhythm.
In retrospect, though, I see that the hundred windows and hundred blasting speakers from hundreds of nearly identical rooms made us less somebody than everybody. Setting up that stereo was plugging in to a writhing late-teenage meta-culture; it signified not so much being home as, reassuringly, having a place on the team.
When I set up the stereo in my new place, the music hit me as anachronism. I was moving toward individuality and privacy, not collegiate communalism. I replayed the tune everyone boomed from their dorm windows my freshman year: “Burning Down The House.”
It is a lonely time, I think. This time of making a first home and feeling that you must be yourself rather than a member of some pop culturally-defined demographic. I’m off at the edge now, feeling little compulsion to see what’s new and hot and cool at every moment. I don’t know the number one song and I haven’t seen a movie in six weeks. I’m not proud of this and I have no disdain for those who enjoy such things. I used to, but now I have stopped caring and floated into the margin.
Now I am sifting through old books in a new house, hoping I won’t always be a ghost. Hoping I soon rematerialize as someone different.
Hoping to find a new home.
