when a person dies, they may stay in spirit, if their business is unfinished enough.
if their energy is strong enough, they could speak to the living.
and every once in a great while, if all the stars align and that spirit has enough to say, they may even inhabit some broken, empty person they left behind.
her words out of my mouth.
her thoughts in my head.
she's inside me.
I can't pinpoint what happened. maybe during one of those endless funeral services, one of those many cold, still nights when I stood over that hole in the ground, maybe that's when it happened. maybe all the accusations I hurled woke her up. maybe the countless barbs I shot hooked under her electromagnet ribcage and ripped her from that bruised petal body, forced her through the spaces in those cheap, unfinished pine slats and back up to the surface. maybe my sobs and tears, my whimpers and moans, lured her upright on the edge of that abyss to stare me down, eye to eye, nose to nose. maybe my desperate gulps for air drew her into a mouth propped open with a long, drawn out scream sounding vaguely like her name. maybe my eyelids, clamped shut in an attempt to slow the drips and drops of wet, salty grief locked her in here with me.
maybe I held tight, with a churning stomach and ripe, gripping lungs, as desperate to hold her as I ever was.
or maybe that wispy, willowy, angel's breath soul had been with me since the day I cut her heart out. maybe I stole them both together, greedily hoarding them under my skin so I wouldn't be without her even though I was walking away.
maybe every funeral I attended, every night I inched my toes over the edge of that seemingly bottomless pit, every insult I spat onto a splintery, nameless box was an effort to exorcise her from me at last. maybe every goodbye I choked on was her, scraping my throat and wrapping herself around my tongue to avoid being wretched out into the stark, harsh reality of a world without each other.
whichever it was, she stayed. and I kept her.
we share an existence, a body, a mind, a heartbeat.
she thinks, and I say it.
I hurt, she weeps.
I was always the louder of us, I was brash and imposing. she more or less stood slightly behind me and to the side, a shadow. but now, after her life and death and resurrection, she has possessed me. it's in the silence of midnight car rides that she speaks. it's the stealthy slip of steady hand, up under my shirt and along my spine that operates my dumb, speechless mouth. a caress of the neck and the ventriloquist show begins, my ripe, life bitten lips whisper her words to the wind as it blows across the surface of the earth and dissipates into the heavens.
not knowing how it started doesn't matter, who inhabits whom is irrelevant. what I do know is that I can never again sleep without her dreams to keep me under. I would never again address god if she was not supplying the prayer. I would feel nothing if her tears didn't sting my eyes, if her laugh didn't spark my smile.
to some folks, some folks think possession is to be controlled and manipulated by a force other than oneself. some folks think possession is quite simply, ownership.
but to me, to her, to Imogene, my Imogene, my beginning, my end, we think to call it nothing more than a Tuesday.
