On Hungry Ghosts

Self-portrait, 2020

I am haunted by everyone I was and everyone I could have been.

I don’t look at my reflection in the dark because I’m not sure who will look back. At night, I wash my hands with my eyes fixed on the plughole drinking the dirt. I ignore the knocking on the glass in front of me.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli writes “The notion of the ‘present’ does not work: in the vast universe there is nothing that we can reasonably call ‘present’”. I suppose this is why the past and lost futures still sit in this body, this chest, circles the shoulders, leans too heavily on the throat.

For such a haunted body full of so many ghosts, I am still lonely. Old selves and lost potential don’t make for very good company.

My father once told me how a hungry ghost took a bite out of his leg and my uncle’s arm, flesh scooped as though taken by a spoon. He and his brother have matching scars. My father’s father cast the ghost away with burnt spells, ashes sprinkled in tea and drunk.

These rituals were not passed to me. I don’t know the correct funeral rites, how to appropriately bury what has passed - so they stay.

Growing up, I’ve been learning to look at these versions of me. They want to take over but I have to say “I’m sorry. You’re not here. You didn’t make it, it’s just me.” Most of them aren’t happy with that. Sometimes they bite, as though if they eat enough of me they will become corporeal.

Eventually, we talk to each other. I note down their complaints and pains, but mostly their hunger. It’s the kind of hunger which is a combination of loneliness and many griefs, an agony howled to January moons.

I apologise again, and again because no one else will. I stitch the bite wounds. I write spells of my own creation, trying to burn and brew correctly. Sometimes they don’t work and the ghosts get angrier. Sometimes, the spells work and I can breathe into the new space in my chest.

I still won’t look in the mirror at night, in case I fall in. If I do, who will guide these ghosts?