How to Be a Ghost Before You're Dead

The mess nostalgia has made of me

Photo credit: AJ Wallace

I had my first panic attack the day I left home. It was Father’s Day weekend, 2012. I’d just finished grad school and was leaving my small town to move to the big city—big to me then—a state away. I slowed to a stop at a light halfway through the drive, bags of clothes rolling around in my backseat, when I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was a hot and humid June day but I rolled the window down trying to take in air that would make my locked up chest expand.

Homesickness is well-named. I have been some degree of unwell since I left all I knew and my body has had to acclimate to a land it does not recognize. Today I write to you from a nice house in a nice neighborhood in a nice city. I pay an HOA to keep everything I see out my window well-tamed, and I can generally get anything I need in a convenient, 10-minute drive here in this metropolitan mosaic of big box stores and crowded microbreweries.

But this is not what I come from. I am far from home. And my body knows it. She longs for the motherland. For the smell of the plants that line my childhood yard and the strange comfort that comes from passing cemeteries where the bones my bones come from lie in the ground.

I am missing wild places.

I’m missing being 12 and walking through the woods to explore an abandoned house with my cousins. I’m missing being seven and cutting through my grandma’s garden to pluck strawberries off the stem on my way to fish in her pond. I’m missing going home with spiderwebs in my hair and dirty hands and knees. I’m missing a full day of playing in the yard, knowing where every bird’s nest and caterpillar cocoon was and running up to every tree to say I love you, I love you, I love you. I know the trees on the land I grew up on, and they know me. They watched my parents bring me home to that house. They watched me learn to do a cartwheel. They supported me as I climbed the ladder into my treehouse and gave me shade and sweet smells on summer days. My sister tree sits near the driveway. I planted her in second grade and we grew up together.

The soil knows me. The water knows me. The bats that come at dusk to roost in the southern eave of my childhood home know when I am near. And I know the shape of the mountain ridge seen from that front yard like the face of someone I love and have observed the slopes and colors of my whole life. I know where each patch of bull thistle grows and have not made the mistake of stepping on it barefoot in 30 years. I know where the fence is broken and where the sun will set in any season.

When I go back to visit my father there now, which isn’t as often as I want these days, I pull into the driveway and something in my body lies down and wakes up at the same time. I get out of the car, stretch my legs, and look around at all that has changed since I was last there. In my mind I say “I’m here! I’m home, everyone!” to the grass and the sky and the hills like I’m greeting the family dog. And they look up. They look right at me. We are back together again. The part of them in me and the part of me in them are again complete.

Every visit, there will be the ceremonial walking of the property that me and my father do at dusk. We walk, hands in pockets, around the yard as he tells me of any work he’s recently done to the house or anything new he’s planted and how it’s growing. He’ll complain about an animal getting his squash but say, “Look how big the cucumbers are.” I am glad to be home and see my old friends, my wild ancestors covered in bark or blades of grass, but I mourn the tree my father has had to cut down and the clear signs of the passing of time when the bush I remember as smaller than me is now twice my height. The shifts in topography in my childhood home’s yard feel threatening, akin to the ever-deepening lines on my father’s face, and I feel a dreadful sense of mortality for myself and all of us living things.

When I visit I stay in my old bedroom. Some of the furniture has changed, but a lot of it is the same. My father has updated my bedroom walls from green to eggshell, but there are still the nicks in the bathroom doorframe that mark my growing height from ages four to eight. I feel like a giant standing in front of the mirror where it’s burned into my brain that my reflection shouldn’t be able to reach the top cabinet where my parents kept coconut suntan lotion and rubbing alcohol. I put my hand on the wall beside my bed where I used to stare each night trying to fall asleep. I look to see if the brown drop of blood on the carpet from cutting my foot in 2003 is still there because I forgot to clean it up then and now I refuse to remove this part of me that still lives here.

While in this old house I picture what used to be. I stand in rooms and picture our dinners and birthday parties and Saturday mornings with the radio on making breakfast like I’m watching a movie. I sit on the couch where I’d curl up and read books all winter and smile when I find my high school pajamas still in my bottom drawer because I won’t remove those either. My dad built this home on inherited land. Land his parents farmed and that has raised many of my family members. We are the only people who have lived in this house. We are all it knows. Every few years my father will bring up selling it and I have to go numb to keep from dissolving. The floors creak but this house has no ghosts, except me. I’m haunted by my childhood home and I am what haunts it. No one has died here, but I have lived, and I’ve lived so deeply between these walls that future owners will feel me. It’s stained with me. I am in its particles. I will replay here, walking the floorboards and brushing by you down the hall, for centuries to come. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe said, but I never really left.

On my way out of town, I pass my grandparents’ old house, the one I spent almost as much time in growing up as I did my own. But it doesn’t look the same. My grandparents are long gone, like so many other things, and the small house we used to pack into at Thanksgiving has now been abandoned for nearly 20 years. She peaks out overtop thick overgrowth, covered in vines and tangles of branches that would make it impossible to get anywhere near the front door. Before long, my grandparents’ house will be one you’d stumble upon in the woods and think someone used to live here as you pass by all that remains of the foundation and front steps. I’m sad about the state of it but then I think good for her, getting back to nature.

I can’t go in that old house now, but I go there in my dreams. It’s the most common recurring setting of my sleeping self. In dreams I stand in the kitchen. Everything is as it was—the stove here and the coffee table there—but it’s dim and silent and still. Vines grow up the walls and across rooms and I don’t want to stay but can’t bear to leave. I am cursed with the disease of nostalgia.

I say goodbye to it all as I drive out of this little Appalachian town and back to modern suburbia where I know no one in any cemetery and I can’t get anything to grow in the dirt. I pull in and the yard does not look up to greet me. I’ve lived in this new house nine years and we are still no more warmed up to one other than the day I moved in. It’s not that we have anything against each other—we just know we’re not of each other. We are not family. This land is a stranger yet. I do not reach for her. She does not lean toward me.

I wash my hands when I get inside with water that does not come from the well my grandfather dug decades prior. I look in a mirror that holds no memories, and I always swear my hair has grown from just a few days of being back at my ancestral home where I am tethered to lifeblood in the same way an umbilical cord once connected me to my mother. I will settle back into my life here as I always do, but somewhere in me a door closes and I will feel too clean and too pale until I am back home again. There I will lay my body on the earth and blood will rush back into my cheeks as my bones vibrate to the sound of my truest mother’s heartbeat, my ear pressed to the ground.