I lived in a house at the oceanside, up high on a craggy cliff. The drifting clouds overhead and that constant whip of Sea wind rattling me made the place mutable and alive. I would stand for hours, coat wrapped tight around me, and stare at the punishing water that came crashing into the whorls and rips of the claw rocks below. It was devastation and renewal all at once, an endless theatre play of hubris giving way to destruction and rebirth. I would just watch. And the sun would plummet behind me and everything would get pale and whispery and dark. There's a perfection in that golden hour, just before nightfall, and a passion that rises up from the cold waters of the undying Sea.

The gulls would flock in hypnotic patterns, and I would wait to see their actions, guess at them and play prognosticator, hoping to get a glimpse into whatever logic set them to flight or to squawk, running along the rock faces or roosting in the spine of the falling lighthouse. I wasn't able to decipher their codes or their language, and why they did anything when they did it still remains a total mystery, and not even an interesting one, because they really don't do too much at all. It's the not knowing, like it always is, that gets me the worst.

I didn't have too many visitors up there. It was out of the way, more so than is realistic to expect folk to find you. There aren't any real roads, just unmarked dirt paths that wind through grassy fields and thatched snarls of wood and debris. It's not easy to drive through, and it's barely worth walking along, so mostly I was ignored and left alone in my home. Just me and my thoughts and the immortal rush of the ocean below. It was enough for me, most always, and I rarely felt the sting of loneliness at all. Every now and then, some pitch black night listening to the coo of mourning doves or the hiss, sparkle and retreat of a stormfront's messenger waves would fill me, suddenly, with the want or maybe the need to share the moment and make it real instead of the dreamstuff I was used to spinning, concocting and plying up the falling drywall of my memory with. It's hard, you know, in that isolation, to determine what's really going on. So I let it all be real, the nights and the days, what I saw and what I pretended to see, what happened and what I imagined might be happening. I just let it all be real, because it didn't matter anyways. There was nobody to lie to but me, and I didn't really care too much if I spilled a half-truth here and there.

I started going mad, I suppose, left alone up in that house. It's easy to do it, all by yourself, and I could feel bits of my former sanity breaking into the irrational parts like a news anchor busting a big story. But eventually I learned to ignore those things, and one by one, the fantasies and bugbears I should've learned to conceal and tamp down in my wandering brain became something larger and too concrete not to appeal to whatever nature I still had left that was trying to root into the real earth that was built up so firmly under my feet. I began to speak with spectral things that didn't honestly have voices, but would answer me all the same. We would hold full fledged conversations, not just one sided speeches made up of my ranting, but deep and fulfilling dialogs. It kept me afloat in a way that I hadn't been earlier, living through them, my ghostly friends. I lived in a house of spirits.

They were numerous, too, a whole chorus of the unearthly, chained into the walls and the floors by my subconscious and built into the house by design. They had their designated spots, and their sadness reflected whatever part of my home they were confined to. They oozed that sadness, teary things full up of longing and heartache, just the way I conjured them to be. They moved with a heft that made me lurch with guilt pangs just to look at them. They had those eyes that look hurt no matter what, blackened and deep, soulful and strict in their detuned radio wistfulness. You would want to weep, probably, just to see them, there, matted up and drowning in their own misery night after night. I got, from them, a healthy dose of diseased thinking, a dry rot of my hope and a wish, curdled and creeping beneath the surface of everything I happened to be, to maybe take a shot and end the whole sad affair.

Those ghosts, you can't imagine what wretchedness they saw in the world. You can't imagine how badly they look at it, their families and the towns they lived in. It's a shame how taken and stolen their little lives were, how easy it was to crush those poor folks like bugs and just leave their corpse bodies littering the hills and the valleys with their cracked ambitions. The ghost in the kitchen was murdered, I figured, by a jealous ex-lover. Another died with her son while giving birth. She still cradles that stillborn child to her silent heart, too, and she won't stop just because both she and the babe are cold in a grave somewhere. They'd hover around, these ciphers of misery, haunting me and chilling me all while keeping me company and stopping some interminable descent I wouldn't be able to control even a bit. They were lifeguards, I suppose, but such draining ones that I couldn't quite figure just where their aid began and their hurt ended. I mostly just drifted along with them. The convict beaten to death by policemen, the young girl forced into a loveless marriage and driven to suicide, the vagabond left for dead by an aged prostitute... I lived with them all, probably just in my head, but sure real enough to connect with them, to identify with them, befriend them and get sucked into their tempest little worlds of defeat.

My blooming madness swept itself into a tornado of depression and emotional poverty. I squirmed myself through the long nights, barely alive and barely hoping for anything. My most stalwart confidant was a girl drowned in a bathtub by a psychotic grandmother. It's hard to retain a good natured outlook in the face of that.

It was easy to lose the light, there, in that house. It was easy to sink on down with the dread and the horridness. They had wandered all of the dimmest paths, met with fates punctuated by pointlessness and tragedy. They were extinguished lamps, cold and bleak and so simple to follow down into their wasting that it just came naturally, like an instinct to lay down and sleep it all away. I found myself moving, but dead, a dug up animate, a wandering thing without much in the way of purpose or dreaming.

And then one night, as I was talking with a man burnt up in boat fire, I see these two ghosts, flat and pale white, dancing out over the cliff's edge on the trip of the void. They moved in tandem so sweet and gorgeous, shimmering like ivory dolls in the moon, fluttering on top of nothingness and moving like angels. I was stunned. None of them, none of those spirits in my house had ever done anything pretty at all. They were better at being morose and dreary. But this was lovely, a light splaying mix of pirouettes and dips and flight. It was grace on phantom footfalls, airy and lively even executed by the dead. The couple, well they were reflective and stellar, spangled by the glut of evening stars and so connected, one to the other, that death had just been another bend in their lives together. They were music box figurines, porcelain and perfection and mesmerizing in their shining passion. I couldn't take my eyes off them. I couldn't stop watching their dance. Each movement sprayed etching acid into my brain, staining mental glass with gorgeous imagery. They were so amazingly bright, so swirled with butterfly elegance that I couldn't help but tumble with envy. I felt a coal-smolder deep in my gut, the prelude to an ignition. And then, suddenly, I was swimming in hope and sparking with novel abandon. They glided out, high above the ocean, charming in their lilt and melody. It was so engaging, so brilliant that I was left in the wake of it just blinking and smiling and alive.

I had been surrounded so long by nothing close to hope, but they were embodying it, they were still chained together in it, moving close and sweetened in their affection, in their dance. They lived even after dying, and I realized, then, that all the others had probably never really been alive at all. When they died they moved themselves back right where they'd been, probably never skipping a heartbeat. They were content to wallow in their descent. They allowed my contentment to follow. But I was to blame. I let myself slide on down the staircase and into that foul basement.

But these two, these two lovers gave me something simple and glitteringly phosphorescent to cling to, to adore... to fall in love with, and thus aspire to.

I watched them dance all throughout the night. I watched and I felt a doping of my veins, a high that bubbled through me, a feeling that I hadn't had in so very long. It was incredible, like being born again in a flame of sweetness and light. All of their love coursed on through me, pushing me to stand up, to stand up and take charge of myself again. I was awash in aspiration, in the desire and then even the need to do better, to do right by my being, and correct the downward slide I'd gotten all too accustomed to. I was ready to slough off those ghostly leeches and move forward with that chin of mine held high and proud.

When day broke and my ghostly couple vanished, I walked with exhilaration out of that house. I boarded up the door, and never once looked back.

THE END.

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