![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Sep. 1st, 2006 01:56 pmA trail of ghosts followed me round the shopping centre today.
Maybe it was the spring blossom or maybe it was because I've almost put the flu behind me, but I kept looking round to see if fellow-shoppers could see Doris and Charles and Alison and Martin and Liz and Mark.
Doris was tiny and had big eyes and a serious face. Mum said she didn't smile because she had been through a lot, but that things would get better now she was in a safe country. She wanted to play with me and not my sisters, which made me feel very good. And I could make her give a wisp of a smile sometimes. Mostly she played very intently and we kept our playworld very small and safe.
One day she didn't come and play. "Don't ask for her next door," Dad said. He said a bit later that she had been admitted to hospital and never came out. It wasn't until I was a teenager that my parents explained she died from complications. I still see her, doll-like and serious, playing on the verandah near the ginger lilies.
Charles was a boisterous young man. Black hair and irrepressible. He lived across the road in a big grey-blue house. We seldom went into his house because he was always hungry and our place was biscuit-central. He helped us make the infamous dam that flooded the street.
Instead of going to a local high school, he moved to Tasmania. Somehow, his parents forgot to let us all say goodbye. Three years later he died in a car accident. When I pass his house I still say "'Bye Charles." I hope he hears me.
I knew a bunch of kids through bar mitzvahs. We met on and off during the four year period when we all turned thirteen. We were all relatives or our parents were friends. My sister married one of them, but the rest have vanished. Martin vanished.
Martin liked to lead. He loved a moment of attention. Martin stood on a big rock at his own barmitzvah saying "I have a special disappearing trick. I can fade from here, while you watch." We dared him to, but someone called us inside before he could show us his trick. He died before the next barmitzvah.
Something in me holds it against him that he disappeared permanently. From that day, I didn't dare other children and I didn't take dares. Deep in my mind I never accepted that he was dead. He stepped off that rock and slipped sidewise into a strange land.
Alison *did* die. She was killed in a car crash before she was nineteen. We were friends from primary school. She and Marilla and Rosemary and I had a secret club with codes and passwords when we were in early high school. Marilla and I still see each other and we still miss Alison.
Liz had a choice. She is the reason I am still alive despite things going very wrong in my life. She chose not to live when she turned nineteen. She was entitled to choose death, but I have seen the wreck left for others by her suicide and I will not take that path.
Mark chose life. He had emphysema and made every moment count. We were in a Jewish singles group together and I don't know a single woman in that group who wasn't half in love with him.
And these are the ghosts who trailed me today.
Maybe it was the spring blossom or maybe it was because I've almost put the flu behind me, but I kept looking round to see if fellow-shoppers could see Doris and Charles and Alison and Martin and Liz and Mark.
Doris was tiny and had big eyes and a serious face. Mum said she didn't smile because she had been through a lot, but that things would get better now she was in a safe country. She wanted to play with me and not my sisters, which made me feel very good. And I could make her give a wisp of a smile sometimes. Mostly she played very intently and we kept our playworld very small and safe.
One day she didn't come and play. "Don't ask for her next door," Dad said. He said a bit later that she had been admitted to hospital and never came out. It wasn't until I was a teenager that my parents explained she died from complications. I still see her, doll-like and serious, playing on the verandah near the ginger lilies.
Charles was a boisterous young man. Black hair and irrepressible. He lived across the road in a big grey-blue house. We seldom went into his house because he was always hungry and our place was biscuit-central. He helped us make the infamous dam that flooded the street.
Instead of going to a local high school, he moved to Tasmania. Somehow, his parents forgot to let us all say goodbye. Three years later he died in a car accident. When I pass his house I still say "'Bye Charles." I hope he hears me.
I knew a bunch of kids through bar mitzvahs. We met on and off during the four year period when we all turned thirteen. We were all relatives or our parents were friends. My sister married one of them, but the rest have vanished. Martin vanished.
Martin liked to lead. He loved a moment of attention. Martin stood on a big rock at his own barmitzvah saying "I have a special disappearing trick. I can fade from here, while you watch." We dared him to, but someone called us inside before he could show us his trick. He died before the next barmitzvah.
Something in me holds it against him that he disappeared permanently. From that day, I didn't dare other children and I didn't take dares. Deep in my mind I never accepted that he was dead. He stepped off that rock and slipped sidewise into a strange land.
Alison *did* die. She was killed in a car crash before she was nineteen. We were friends from primary school. She and Marilla and Rosemary and I had a secret club with codes and passwords when we were in early high school. Marilla and I still see each other and we still miss Alison.
Liz had a choice. She is the reason I am still alive despite things going very wrong in my life. She chose not to live when she turned nineteen. She was entitled to choose death, but I have seen the wreck left for others by her suicide and I will not take that path.
Mark chose life. He had emphysema and made every moment count. We were in a Jewish singles group together and I don't know a single woman in that group who wasn't half in love with him.
And these are the ghosts who trailed me today.