Winter ghost love song

A valentine to the presence of absence

From left: Still from Bogdanka Poznanovic’s public performance piece ‘Action-Heart-Object’, Helene Schjerfbeck, Red roses in a vase, 1944, Francisco de Zurbarán, Allegory of Charity, 1655, Tracey Emin, The News is I Love You, 2021, Text from The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart by Margaret Atwood

A week in the country, in an old farmhouse. Snow fell and blanketed the fields. Wind came in gusts and blew fiercely. At night I could feel it, whispering through the walls, stoking my hair on the pillow.

I knew nothing about him, the ghost, apart from multiple people in my family insisting they’ve seen him. He once lived in the house, they imagine.

Could that be love? I wondered. Belonging to a place so deeply that your loyalty to it extends even beyond death?

I both wanted and didn’t want to see him. When I woke in the middle of the night I would keep my eyes closed, imaging his face, inches from mine. It felt like he was always around the corner. His presence would be confirmation, I supposed, that such a love was possible.

Afternoons were quiet; no one was home. I positioned the desk in front of an arched window. I wanted to spend time in an old farmhouse because I’m writing about one; my extended family was out of town and I was eager to immerse myself in the “psychology of the house”.¹ Stationed at the desk, my back was exposed to the rest of the room. Every so often, the wooden floors would creak behind me. My heart would hitch and I’d think it’s him, and spin around wildly as though speed would remedy the shock of our encounter, but it was only ever the cat, with its brilliant marble-green eyes and war-wound gash across the nose, never the man. Never the ghost.