ghost in forty-three

A ghost once struck happy white footsteps in fresh morning pitter-patter, sipped cups of piping hot "goody!" with fluffy white sweet on top. He liked to wander through hallowed,golden, silent halls,

He was always be curious of visions he had of himself alone in rooms full of white elephant psyche, took hold of notes on clef measures that showed him to utter his own melodic joy. He formed verbal patterns on sheets made of thin, brown bark bleached white whenever it hurt his Mom or Dad worse than him. He learned what it meant when April snow formed from tear-streamed guitars.

(In the funeral parlor, my five year old eyes cast their gaze on a still,old grandma who was not my own and whom I'd never known, laying without life in a painted, wooden box. The unavoidable stillness of this winter-white day held me captive for twenty years. Now and then came nights when I would lay awake and wonder if I meet her the next morning. I would pray the Lord my soul to keep or take, but I would never make my request out loud for fear that saying it would make it happen.)

One day he took a detour through a land of unmet fancy, was pointed toward a land filled with cool pink triangle and red hot heart. It splintered him away from spew brown pew where his Sunday schoolteachers used to like to sit and glare at him, as he stood on the altar and played grown-up church. On Friday evenings, he was led to find himself in the hot tub heat of a downtown bathhouse. Not soon after he found this new self-expression, he was led down a blond-brick road made of muscle-bound over-ambition. for the next five years, his fists and feet would make black and blue mean romance.

(Fifteen years into this twenty, doctor's words affirmed what I'd first seen in that grandma's face: that I was next. I confirmed this in my head,"It's just as well. You always knew this deep down.")

He coped by making friends with pure off-white powder and swallowed down a sickness that left spots on his lungs, stole t-cells for days and left him for white light,

Trying to fit this four letter dis-ease into a three-letter cause was like herding whipped monkeys from barrels into cages where cats used to live, guns they would need to expel a viral load of 2.2 million had been gathering for a year after Grandma left earth. On her first late birthday, I decided I would pay tribute to her by learning to save myself. This made my mother smile wide.

Thanksgiving week is not a week meant for hospital stays, but this parasite in me looked at the brochure and found it a perfect vacation spot. Digging out from under this ditch led me from that end to a new beginning,where too low will one day become a number with twenty years of shade for substance after all, this was the thief at its most prosperous,who almost totally occupied my body cells I had left I could count in a minute ability to fight back slowly stolen away, yet will of mind left intact, fever of 105 one minute,99 the next. It made my body cradle itself within a garden of frozen flowers, aborting any remaining attempt to go it alone.

(But a peaceful ghost leapt over him, saved him from this story and left him for calm.)

Death's presence sounded like James Earl Jones came to cover me over as I lay shivering in bed. Instead of smothering me, he put his hands on a pillow as I placed it over my chest and smothered the virus. When my room was on his rounds list, a muscular, male nurse was a pleasant mental distraction. He held me over until my guardian goddess, Persephone, came to help me sow a new grain of faith. She brought me three hours of Prince in symbolic form, singing triumphantly about his Emancipation which I would adapt into a recipe for my own.

(His body brought back, now a little less closer to the ghost's thinness,he began to walk a tightrope placed under clear sky. He looked up, "Why, God? why did you spare me?)

The answer: "The only love there is is The Love We Make." It's a refrain repeated at the end of a song that played as I sorted out my escape from mortality. I played that song over and over until I understood happiness is the only burden I have to bear now. One month and 100 T-cells later, the virus was exiled to hiding places outside my veins. news of this was a happiness I trumpeted to my parents and family as I began rehabilitating at Davids' Place, "a positive place for positive people."

Sooner than he knew he set out walking, winding uphill through a neighborhood with grey pavement, green grass and serene suburban house. When he looked up, he saw himself in fluffy white bodies floating by now, they never rain on his parade unless he wants to get wet.

(Five more years past, I walked through the same hilly area of houses, passing out work flyers to house, traveling further and further away from that glass voice, always saying, "You'll never make it past twenty-five," bopping down the street to headphones full of funk, warm San Diego December afternoon sun showering its grace down on me, doing the only thing worth doing about this fearful ghost: forgetting it ever existed.)

©2016 Eric Franklin Crow