i've been scared for years now

on being haunted by ghosts of giovanna past

Of many things I feared in my adolescence, the dark blanket of night still scares me to this day. When I can’t see anything—I can see absolutely anything. Shadows move. Air ducts creak. My clothes suddenly become loud, grating against the coarse threads of my quilt. I’m haunted by what I can’t quite see.

When I graduated from undergrad, my thesis was about the literary representation of hauntology (which is, yes, a pun on ontology—the study of naming things). Hauntology puts a name to the haunting that the world felt after the fall of the Soviet Union, perhaps most clearly felt in the phrase “communism is best in theory, worst in execution.” We’re left thinking—well, what if we just haven’t executed it well enough? (Yes, I did live in a co-op.) In those years, I was writing about the many implications of hauntology, being “haunted” by the specters of what could have been/should have been/might have been. If you want to read the thesis, have at it. It’s 60 pages long and incredibly dense with literary theory and references to poetry. It, too, scares me.

This thesis has been sitting in my laptop for two years, and I have been long wondering what to do with it—how to expand on it, how to write about haunting, how to write about fear. It’s become an obsession. I bought a 900-page tome collecting the best essays on hauntology since the 1990’s. I have read countless memoirs about family ghosts. I have watched horror movie after horror movie (falling asleep through most).

All this to say that I’ve let this exploration become a specter in itself. I now fear the topic, which slips through my fingers every time I try to grab ahold. Tonight, I was writing poems in a document that I have called “hauntology beginnings,” which is a holding cell for all poems I’ve written since my last few manuscripts. In reviewing it, the usual poems are there—my “all cops suck” poem, my "all hail the ancestors” poem, and most clearly, my “god I am haunted by my past” poems.

I grew old quickly in my adolescence. In high school, the sudden onset of OCD meant that I hardly finished my senior year. I dropped out of college, briefly, to recover from an eating disorder. I made a lot of friendships with girls who never actually liked me. I entered relationships with people who were bound to break my heart. And this is all normal! I have to tell myself that this is simply life, that everyone has these periods of doubt and despair and boohoo-self-pity-me-I-had-it-so-hard. And yet, I can’t shake the undoubted fear that these specters of my past selves lord over me. They haunt me, these young girls with wide-eyed hopes.

I’ve found that my only way through is to memorialize. To never forget. To let the ghosts hover over you in books gathering dust of peoples’ shelves. And undoubtedly, this means that I’ve got to write.

I’m writing lots of things—an essay collection, a poetry collection, an avant garde performance script—and I want to spend this time before the new year taking stock of all I’ve done, even if it’s not quite ready for public consumption yet. Writing is a slow, slow death—and more importantly, a fast, fast life. I’m driving right past those ghosts, and I’m waving them on. Come on, girls. Keep up.