Nocturnal Images of scenes which I had never lived kept haunting me
every night. The same nightmare kept lodging on top of my ribs. With the passivity of a paralysed chest, I offered this Ghoul a steady floor to sit on.
My head was almost cut-off and I could only get dexterity flowing up
until my fingers. I started automatically writing to escape her, but just like
an amorous obsession, the ghoul found refuge between my ribs, between
my words.
I kept writing, she kept lurking.
I slowly started enjoying her company as if befriending a monster. I started following her traces. She knew so well how to do fleshly alliance through the deceptive artifice of appearance. She lured me, camouflaged as my father,
we conversed in silence; as my mother, she cradled me like a child, took my hand towards the unknown and then disappeared, leaving me in the cradle
of a disappointment no magic could ever save me from. Then she appeared, again, as a friend, and as a mother-friend and a father-friend.
She started borrowing facial scrapes and stitching them together
beyond recognition. I could only track the inkling of familiarity melted
with estrangement, like a kid playing encounters as if games of recognition and mis-recognition,
a penumbra of her aromatic presence.
I discovered that between the words I had written, lodged an anthology of conversing ghosts. They spoke together at times, interrupted each other at times; overarching thoughts limpid like a dragonfly and sometimes scrapes
like dried grinded leaves of camomile. I was the only one unaware of their presence, them taking turns, as I thought I owned their murmurings.
We have reached a balance, almost a cooperative agreement. She provides
me the basis to dress the fantasies with flesh, and we give her the credit to manifest in this lived body.
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