Emergence.

Can you hear the rain? Most likely you can’t see it in the dark, but you know it’s raining because you can hear it. I can hear it too. But then, if I focus, if I shift my attention outside of this body into the night, I can feel the droplets of water pushing a path through the air as they fall. I can feel each miniature explosion as the droplets collide with the world, dissipating over every surface. I can feel the water slipping and slithering, coming together to reunite in cold, silky puddles. It’s close to midnight, on the eve of the winter solstice, which makes it much easier to focus on such things. The air is clear, not muddled with heat or noise.

You’re looking sleepy. Wine warm and relaxed in the armchair opposite. I could sleep too, and perhaps slip out for a time. It’s been a while since I last felt the icy air, and the shivers of raindrops as they pass through my being.

Christmas is a time for ghosts. Halloween? An invention. The true time ghosts like to wander the earth, yes, it’s Christmas, and I’m no exception.

A ghost, you see, is really nothing more than energy and existential willpower. I am a remnant of my living self, and, in the beginning, I wasn’t much more than a wisp; you could say a shade. Was I in the underworld or the afterlife? I don’t think I was, I can’t say for certain. By dying I’d lost most of my sense of form and purpose, I really wasn’t much of anything at all.

When you’re no longer in your body, you soon realise everything in the world is formed of energy. In this weak and confused state soon after death, you’re at its mercy, you’re in it and you’re part of it. Everything is a blur. Layers of time overlap, places overlap, things vibrate and merge into other things. Most spirits just dissolve and disappear, not able to withstand it.

But not I! Now, whether this is a residue from my first lived life I can’t say, I don’t remember much of the person I originally was, but in death I had a strong sense of needing to survive, of needing to become something. By my willpower alone I kept myself together, but I found myself trapped in the moment of my death.

Of my life, I remembered that moment alone, and I relived it over and over. The stab of the blade piercing my young skin, my last breath furling out from my body into the icy air, with it my fleeing spirit. I saw the snowflakes falling around my dead body until they stopped, hanging mid-air; my murderer poised over me, my blood hanging in a drip from his blade, a drip that would never fall. My energy was bound to that moment, trapped in that moment.

I was lucky to die at midwinter, I could keep myself together in the cold. I hid inside the frozen leaf of a Laurel tree for a while, feeling the steady, throbbing life of the tree, feeling its will to grow and survive; it soothed and nurtured me while I grew stronger.

I realised if I was energy then I could use energy. I learned to shape myself and form myself from something passive into something active, initially from the energy in the air itself, then more readily, from the earth. I learned to recognise and understand different types of energy, which ones help and which ones to avoid.

Electricity is a sharp, spiking, buzz in its wires and machines. It’s as painful to a ghost as it is to a living being. It drains your energy; it moves so fast it sucks you away with it before you can absorb it. That’s why I don’t have a television, even worse a microwave oven, and why we are sitting here by candlelight.

I learned to stay in the shadows, avoiding sunlight more than any other kind of light. Sunlight shines through me, warming and softening me, trying to melt me with peace and comfort. I avoid busy places and crowds. Loud sounds reverberate through me, disrupting me and making it difficult to hold my form; imagine a dish of water placed on a speaker. Everything that moves through the air, like I do as a spirit, is energy. I’m protected from it while I’m moored in a living body, but I must still be careful.

At mid-winter the earth turns away from the sun, grey days create soothing shadows, and long dark nights. The icy air doesn’t have as much distracting energy in it. When I’m in spirit, in the cold I can sharpen and hold my form. At mid-winter I’m at my strongest.

Over the years I’ve witnessed many deaths and seen many ways a spirit leaves a body. Peaceful deaths where a spirit simply acquiesces and merges into the light, accidental deaths where a spirit will stay in the moment for a while trying to comprehend before eventually accepting and dissolving. Violent deaths do something else to your energy, you don’t dissolve, you burn away. All the anger or fear or trauma, the suddenness of your death; your new and fragile spirit can’t hold a form like that. You disintegrate in a flash, like a spark igniting fuel vapour. I’ve seen it many times.

My own death was something of a mixture, violent, but also accidental, perhaps that gave me a unique advantage.

I began to test the boundaries of my world. Something was keeping me in that moment, an invisible barrier separating me from the living world. I could sense time spanning out on either side of me, a bit like that effect when two mirrors reflect one another; I could sense the living world on the other side, but I was trapped in a bubble, a span of not more than twenty paces around my dead body.

I focussed all my attention on trying to get out, in all the ways I could imagine. I  imagined some kind of unknowable, sentient, universal force held me there; whereby if I became slight enough and insignificant enough. it might allow me to slip through unnoticed. I had an unshakeable belief that it was possible to break through, after all there are ghosts in the living world, aren’t there?

I found I simply couldn’t make myself slight enough no matter what I tried. Unhelpfully, or perhaps it did help in the end, I began to powerful energy developing in me, it fizzed through my being like shooting stars, you could say it was the spirit equivalent of anger and frustration, I used this energy to form into the shape of a shard. I embodied the blade which had killed me. I became sharp, unstoppable, deadly. One edge of me became another edge pressed together in a thin pointed shape not more than an electron in width. In this form I stabbed myself against the edge of my prison, willing it to yield to me.

It flexed at first as though it was made of rubber, designed to be tested and to withstand. I felt it was going to repel me, to fling me back. I think I felt fear, a feeling which tested my certainty, pulling at my edges trying to draw my shape apart. Mustering everything I had, I willed myself to be stronger than the universe, to defy its order, to shatter its rules and its confines. I don’t live by backing down and I had no intention of backing down in spirit either. My will alone has kept me together this far and in truth, it only grows.

I focused all my energy, all my force, into one single sharp unbreakable point. I felt the living world getting closer and I pulled myself towards it like a needle first pushing then pulling through the very fabric of the universe.

This is how I emerged into the living world, reborn if you will, a Christmas ghost.

When I broke through there was so much energy around me it was overwhelming. I had emerged into the yard of the farm where I was born, almost exactly the spot where I had been killed. Time had passed and the yard had been laid with cobbles. The fence and gate I had been running through, the laurel tree, all gone.  All I could do was huddle in an amorphous blob inside one of the frozen cobbles of the yard, reassured by the certainty of the stone surrounding me, wavering, and trying to fortify myself.

Bit by bit I began to discern and understand patterns in the energy around me, I began to understand the wind and the rain. I avoided the day, but when I felt strong enough, I formed at night, and in time seeped in through the wood of the back door.

People were living in the farmhouse, a young couple. For a while I resided within a decorative teapot on their dresser. I studied them and observed them, seeking to make sense of their energies. There is so much energy in a body, neurons firing, hearts pumping, cells respiring, dividing, dying; there is warmth, movement, and life. I could see their spirits, the forms and shapes reflecting their moods. I marvelled at how unknowingly intertwined spirit and body are.

I saw the tiny spirits of her unborn children free themselves from her swollen belly and vanish. I could sense the energy of grief and loneliness which swirled around her. I could see how her spirit shrank inside her body over time, until it was as small and hard as lump of coal just under her ribs.

I sensed her distress as she drank the poison. I observed her heart slow, almost to a stop, allowing her spirit to break free. I thought to myself it was a such a waste.

Perhaps I should have mentioned while I’d existed among them in the teapot, I’d spent a great deal of time seeking to also understand my spirit’s energy and the ways in which I can use it to interact with the world of the living. I’d developed my powers to the extent that I could be considered a poltergeist. I could help by moving lost things into sight. When the rope accidentally got tangled around the man, threatening to pull him behind the plough, I could help by forcing myself into a single point of the metal to which it was bound, so that it snapped and freed him. I saved him, he was a good man, and I came to love him in time.

I’d watched them both sleeping and slipped in through the woman’s nose on a breath to experience her dreams.

There is a moment when the spirit leaves a body, yet the body still lives, the heart beats irregularly, neurons in the brain fire wildly striving to cling to life. I saw her spirit leave her body, for the briefest moment she saw me just before I swooped, diving in through her ear, expanding as quickly as I could to fill her body and fight the effects of the poison. I willed her lungs to breathe and her heart to beat. If it didn’t work, I was afraid I would be trapped in death with her; I wasn’t sure I would be able to break out twice. As I felt myself absorbing into her, I felt her body growing stronger again. For the first time since my death, I was alive. I had all of her memories, all of her thoughts, I had access to her and at the same time I was me. I stayed that way until he died. I’d hoped his spirit might find the strength to remain with mine, but it didn’t. I moved on. I found other opportunities to live when I could, I realised unconsciousness is a welcoming state, I could evict a spirit from an unconscious body if I chose to.

You told me, in that starry-eyed way that lovers do, you wanted to know me deeply, for us to have no secrets from one another.

Now, let me close my eyes for a moment and slow this body into sleep, I can slip out on a breath. Perhaps you’ll notice the air grow colder, causing you to shiver, as I draw the energy I need to take form. If you look closely, you’ll notice how the candlelight shines through me, even though you can’t see the candle. When I brush my fingertips on your cheek you won’t feel my touch in the way you’re used to, what you’ll feel is me, my energy merging with your energy, my spirit caressing your spirit, willing you to be strong enough to remain with me forever.

April 2024