ghosts

I love how strangers share the most intimate things. The seventy year old man I met in the Cameroon Highlands three years ago told me that his only love died of tuberculosis while they were attending university in England after the Second World War, and recently, the race car driver I sat beside in the plane told me about his Ana.

“This is Ana,” his eyes pointed at his computer screen. “We drove from Montreal to Vancouver.”
There was so much sadness mixed with happiness and longing in his voice that I had to ask where she was. When he replied with, “In Vancouver, but we don’t talk anymore,” my heart sunk for him. Looking over his shoulder, I saw files of his ghost.

As I cycle home after my night shifts, their narratives often play in my head, “She was my only….this is Ana….we met during the war….I was 17….she was 16….she designed this building.” Their stories blend. And I begin to ask what if there is no happy ending. Or more exact, what if there is no happy ending for me? Perhaps, my problem is that I read too many romance novels as a teenager. What if D is right, and that, love is not sprinkled with rose petals? What if love is being in love with memories? Or, being in love with what you had? Mostly, it is men that I know that have the hardest time letting go. They dance with ghosts for years. Even D admits that before he goes to bed, he imagines his ex lying beside him. This is nine years after they broke up.

If this is the case for many men, then many women are faced with dating men with ghosts. As much as the romantic in me love the stories of the old man and the race car driver, I find it pointless to long for someone because that person captured your youth, or a part of a dream, a lifestyle that you once lived. But then a part of me wishes that I am someone's ghost.