Ghosts

The pink curtain haunted the room. There was just one, and it was pulled to the middle of the window. The night looked welcoming from only the two thin slits for moonlight that rotated in that silent breathing room, hypnotizing her, hypnotizing even itself.
She knew she was dreaming of the house again. May be she was awake like the last time it happened- In the middle of the park where her grandchildren liked to play. May be she was on the bus to her son's house. May be she had finally died and this was the last memory that chose to perform a final merciful act to keep the angel from her body. For a few minutes more of a long, long life.

The stillness inside the movement was infinitely deep and silent. She was sitting with her friend, on the edge of a river that did not flow, filling erosions that did not crumble when touched. There was no time in this place. Only peace and the soft scent of cologne wearing out from old clothes. There was permanence and a bland but complete happiness because it came from yesterdays she had forgotten. Without memory there are left only the stale emotions we might have felt. But they grow old- older than us, because there is no face, no reality, or dream to connect them to. They are feelings that circle in the voids of ancient minds, making wrinkled mouths smile some times when we think they are growing too old. When we think it is madness, it is only the trickle of memory into the famine of a tall, towering, intimidating present. It is the past that haunts us best. It is the past that knows us best. And when that old friend begins to betray us, then there is hopeless feeling trapped in a body whose soul left it. This is familiar, because this is how all love stories end.

She was there now, in the room with the pink curtain, but deeper than that. Deeper within herself and him, in the moonlight hypnotizing them both. The pebbles inside the river's water glistened and she could steadily feel her heart beat as the sun twisted its fingers to slip over the wet rocks. Deep inside the water and the sun, there must be a time like this, she thought. Where hearts beat louder than words. Where time is simply irrelevant. She did not want this to end. She would never be able to bear it, if it were to end now and bring with it another damn beginning.

She surfaced from the sun, the water and him. She was breathing as she was crying into the arms of a man whose face too, she had forgotton. Yet this was the only memory that stayed. This was the only noise that drowned out the silence of coffins and hospitals. Her hands clawing at his hands as he grabbed them. And a beautiful voice that said to her many times that night, "I have you. I have you. I have you."