Ghost Girl Memories

     I woke up late on the day I died. It was April 15th, 1954. I remember the date, because I have so much time to remember. I can make new memories, too. But they fade in and out. The more firm my memories, the more firm my existence. Existence, because my life has been over for a long, long time. I don’t know what’s on “the other side,” or if there is one. All I know is I’ve been here since that day. There’s no guidebook, no one to apprentice under, and no advice. I figured it out. I’ve been dead now longer than I was ever alive, so I have experience.
     Waking up late that morning meant I saw the televisions in the windows of Heathcote’s department store downtown. They were brand new things with screens of curved glass projecting soft gray images. I saw Richard Nixon, the vice president, talk about troops going to Indochina. I didn’t really understand that at the time. Even now, the details are hazy.
     In my rush to get to school, I was hit by a truck. It wasn’t dramatic or anything. I was rushing, not looking, and it slammed into me. I fell. I hit my head, hard, on a fire hydrant. I barely remember that. I was just a few feet from school. You’d think I’d haunt the street, but I guess my soul was drawn to the school. It was a place I could fit in.
     After the truck, the next thing I remember, I was in the rafters of the gymnasium. I was pinned to the ceiling, but it felt natural. Like being blown gently by a fan, as if I was a piece of paper, or stuck to the side of a carnival ride. I looked down and saw my classmates Susan Kopecki and Dylan Duncan in gym class. They didn’t see me, as far as I could tell. When I floated gently down, it was like I was weightless, but I could slowly push. I imagined it’s how it felt to be underwater, if I were a good swimmer.
     All I did was float like that. It’s an eerie sensation, having no body. There’s no feeling in your stomach. In fact, for a while, I wasn’t sure if I “looked” like anything. I had no reflection. When I looked down, I saw hands, if I really concentrated. I felt like a cloud of mist or a dust bunny. No shape, but consistent volume. Sometimes I imagined myself as a girl-sized paramecium, wriggling my way through the hallways. Hovering over lockers, watching for the little tingles I could give people. The feeling like they were being watched or that they had a flash of insight but couldn’t remember what.
     That got boring fast. I don’t know how poltergeists can keep it up. So I learned to love just observing. I was always a good student, and now I could take whatever classes I wanted, as many times as I wanted. I soaked up history and English, hovering behind and following the books along with my former classmates. At least, I think they were. Time stops having the same meaning. I don’t really sleep, but I do fade in and out. Sometimes I feel every second, and sometimes, a decade goes by while I’m essentially daydreaming. Time passes, I’m sure, the same way. I just no longer perceive it in any way. It just is, and I am, too.
     Richard Nixon was back in the news, more than once. Back then, they didn’t have a television at the school, yet. So I heard the news over the radio in the teacher’s lounge. He was president when students started to wear black armbands to protest the war in Vietnam. That was connected to the Indochina thing in some way, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
     This existence could be troubling. You could witness people making the same mistakes, again, and again. You had nothing to do but to pay attention. All I had left was a mind, or a consciousness I guess you’d call it. To lose aspects of perception felt more like death than when I hit my head. So I focused. Not just on the classes, but on observing the students. I realized that without a brain, I no longer had puberty or brain chemistry influencing me. I was just the brain in a vat I read about it in Mr. Marsten’s beat-up philosophy textbook. Something along those lines.
     It was around 1983 that I noticed I was spending less and less time with the students, and more with the teachers. I studied the lesson plans. I watched them grade papers and tests. I sat in the teacher’s lounge, watching them sip coffee and stare into space. There was Greg Anderson, Reagan disciple and complete fucking psycho. He seemed like he’d end up in prison, and he did, although not for what I expected. He had a thing for Nancy Gold, a math teacher with long blonde hair who had been a college football cheerleader. Without meaning to, she taught me about feminism.
     The Reagan revolution had radicalized her the other way. Big leftie. My dad would have hated her, I thought, and that possibility made me like her more. She put up a poster of Shirley Chisholm in her classroom, she talked about AIDS and the Black Panthers and the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. She told the class about that just a few days after it happened. I remembered that because my cousin lived in Philadelphia. Teachers were supposed to put politics to the side, but she was passionate about what was right. I loved that so much. When she had fire in her eyes, she was beautiful, like Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
     I spent a long time in her classroom. Sometimes all day, or even after the day was done. I watched Greg Anderson try to ask her out ten or twenty times. At first, it was amusing, to watch how skillfully she rejected him. Over time, I noticed the heavy weight of the footfalls when Greg walked away. The surly, twisting expression on his face. And I started to see Nancy’s eyes dart around the room, looking out the door for help that never came. I never trusted boys much before. My mind hadn’t changed with the new information.
     I wasn’t alone in the school. Even in my paramecium days, I knew that. I couldn’t communicate with them, but there were others like me. Blobs. Like the wax in a lava lamp. Usually they were blue, like a turquoise, or bright green. They moved like jello, vibrating slightly and noiselessly moving. Usually along the ceiling. Sometimes they glowed with radiant light, and sometimes they were dull, matte, flat, like blackened logs in the fireplace of our old house in Modesto, before we had to move.
     Communication was never easy. As in life as in death, it seemed like. I tried getting physically close to them, and I’d pass right through, most of the time. Sometimes they were thick, and it felt like getting your boot stuck in the mud. But the mud was pain and fear and disease and violence, sometimes very old, sometimes raw and painful. I decided it was best to keep to myself, not too different from real life. I’d float behind people and read their books over their shoulder when I wasn’t content just observing. I didn’t need much else. I literally didn’t, of course. I don’t know if there’s a place to “pass on” to, or if I’m a ghost because I had unfinished business. This is all there is. If I’m alone in a crowd of ghosts for the rest of time, then so be it.
     If you’re a mind, if you can think, you still exist. I think that’s Rene Descartes, but our philosophy education was pretty limited. A couple of class sessions in ninth grade social studies, I think. Some of it is hard to take seriously, as a ghost. Materialism? I’ve got some news for you. I tried to focus, conceptualize myself as a “body.” I didn’t get very far. I could see hands at one point. I wasn’t going to expend all my effort to look like Casper, though. I’m fine existing as a will o’the wisp forever. I’m still my mind. I’m still me. Smarter than I was, even. My studies have only improved. I think I could get into college now. My dad never talked about that. He said I had to get married and settle down. In fact, he wanted me to marry Sammy Richelow, the son of one of his golf friends. I loathed him. Right now, I’d like to be a writer. From everything I’ve heard, there’s no money in that.
     My experience tells me that you have to stay focused. Time unspent was time unexperienced. The sleep of the dead. I did not care for it. I searched for new experiences, new stimuli. I crawled around the school’s sewer system, tried to figure out how the heat worked. Electricity was an interesting adventure. I floated out as far as I could go and got to the power lines before I stopped. It wasn’t like a forcefield, it was more like the tide pushing me back in. It was like that on all sides, and even underground. The “school” exists in some metaphysical way, that was my interpretation. I’m bound to it. And so everything else might as well not exist.
     In 1994, I made my most exciting discovery. I found a disused maintenance closet that was wedged in between one wall of the gymnasium and the hallway on the other side. They had built a new wall and created a pocket phantom hallway. The closet was connected to the basement, which you could get into from outside. I liked it in there because it was quiet, and dark, with just a few slivers of ambient outdoor light. Nothing traumatic had ever happened in there, no ghosts were trapped. There was no one like me around. No one living or dead had set foot here in years. Being in there was something like restful sleep. Eventually, some kids found it, and made a little clubhouse for themselves. I observed them for a while, watching what alcohol and cannabis were like. I never tried them while I was alive. Now, I couldn’t even smell it.
     I wondered if ghosts in old mansions became how they were because they were alone. Nothing new to stimulate them. I always felt like I was vanishing, when I stopped thinking. Maybe for others, it was more like retreating, back into yourself. Your old thoughts and your old patterns. Repeating them forever, and never changing. To me, that sounded like hell. A dreary, gray, bureaucratic hell, with brown carpets and musty smells and men with short sleeve shirts and moussed hair. My childhood.
     No body meant no sexuality. Or at least, that was how it manifested for me. I’d had some thoughts and stirrings while I was alive, but kept it locked down. Stirrings were all that were left, some residual emotions. They felt warm, like the sun magnified by the window. A gentle heat making an amber light, diffuse in all directions. I noticed over time that I didn’t understand the boys, on a deeper level than I ever realized. They felt hollow, shallow, and empty. So many boys had an aura of rage about them. Violence and rage and competition were all they had, all I could see. I’ve realized over time that even my point of view is limited. I thought I had access to so much information, but it was still so incomplete. No one really knew anybody.
     There were special people everywhere for those who knew where to look. I don’t think I’m one of them. Maybe just lucky. Maybe just sad. A ghost girl who stuck around to read books and watch people talk probably wasn’t destined for greatness on Earth or in heaven. But I’m here. I will continue to be here. The school building is crumbling, now, and funding for renovations is harder and harder to get. They want to take certain books out of the library. But I’m still here. I will continue to be here. They will not stop my mind from working. As in life, as in death.

© Jessica Umbra, 2024
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