My ghosts
 

“Maybe you should write about your ghosts,” my husband suggests. He’s found me staring at a blank page again. I know what Paul is talking about. We’ve had that conversation before. Yet, they are not at all like the translucent, floating figures in Hollywood movies.
 
They haunt me, coming back time and again, catching me by surprise when I least expect them. Buying a perfume should be a pleasurable errand, but I end up in tears: my grandmother, like a genie, has just materialized out of a bottle of verbena. There she is, not barely-there, as a ghost is supposed to be, oh no, she is very much there. My grandmother is the smell of verbena and the smell of verbena is my grandmother and there is no escaping it. That’s the problem with my ghosts: the intensity of their presence. A film-maker would have to invent a new technique to make them appear denser, heavier, more real than the live characters.
 
My father’s hands, which were large and warm when he was alive, are now enormous, and weighty, and radiating heat. I still see them sometimes in the early morning, at that confusing time when the brain tries to extract itself out of dreams like a worm crawling out of a hole.
 
And who decided that ghosts should be white? My ghosts are more colorful than the living.  When the evenings got fresher, toward the end of summer, my grandfather would throw on a brown turtleneck, patched at the elbows and so worn out that the wool shimmered like a snake’s skin. That brown, in itself an unremarkable chocolate, now becomes extremely distinctive. “My grandfather used to wear a sweater just that color!” I foolishly tell a stranger at a party.
 
In movies, ghosts scream and howl. At least, mine don’t do that. The radio plays Johnny Cash and here comes Grandpa again, humming along: “I love you so, don’t make me go-oh… My heart would break, I’d miss you so-oh…” His voice is almost as low as the original and he is endearingly off-key on the last “so”.
 
I accidentally tap the bottle against the glass while pouring myself another brandy, clink! and Granny is stirring the sugar in homemade lemonade: clink-clink-clink chimes the spoon against the glass.
 
Paul comes back in the bedroom: “Hey Sonia, did you take your medicine, sweetie?” Yes, I did. I’m getting better at the whole routine, you see: writing a diary, taking my medicine, keeping the ghosts away. Yes, I’m definitely getting better.
 


* Ariane Synovitz writes “I cannot believe it is more than half a year since my 1984 piece appeared on Ink-Sweat-and-Tears! Sometimes, life seems to go its own way… And yet, summed up in 20 words, it looks like not much has changed: Even though I am a native French speaker, I enjoy writing fiction in English as a hobby. I currently live in Prague, Czech Republic.”