It’s tough to always be in love with a ghost. Also it’s easy. The living don’t stand a chance against ghosts. In loving ghosts there are no real complications, no real disappointments, no real anything. There’s lots of teething on absence, lots of wrestling with thin, haunted air.

Loving a ghost is like having some incorruptible tryst in a dream-state. To remain in love with a ghost, to maintain the relationship, you must spend a lot of time in the Land of Dreams, in the Land of the Dead. If you stay there long enough you become more ghost than human. It is one of the side-effects that comes with that sort of traveling.

Anya I long to reach you only because I know that you are unreachable. It keeps my longing in a chrysalis state, a cocoon state. Nothing ever grows, it simply hums and palpitates and aspires toward growth. It is the shadow twin of growth.

Anya, I couldn’t reach you in life, not your deep and true center, and I cannot reach you in death, and so my relationship to you remains one of thorny and perpetual expectancy. To reach you would mean a betrayal of dreams. Or perhaps, if I am honest with myself, they are illusions masquerading as dreams. It is hard to tell, Anya. Impalpability makes for complicated living.

Sometimes you have to walk through the boneyard in order to reach the garden.

This is what I tell myself. What I keep telling myself.

These echoes are tinted, Anya. That sad molten brown of ruptured sunsets,

of treeless fields.

You know what I am talking about Anya. You always did.