Blue- A Ghost Story

The Blue by Susan Buffum (The Hanging Man and Other Stories, copyright 2018)


     The world has gone all blue. I’d noticed this the moment I’d opened my eyes. It all seems like a very long time ago, but the clocks I can see tell me nothing in regards to time. It always seems to be three o’clock, although I swear I can hear the second hands ticking, the hours chiming, however the sound seems to come from far away, not from the same rooms in which the clocks are located.

     I can touch things, however it’s like pushing my hand into a thin blue membrane. I can’t really tell if I am enshrouded in this membrane, or if this membrane hangs like curtains throughout the rooms I move through via narrow corridors between the membranes. The membrane is cold to the touch. It never varies in temperature. I do not feel the cold unless I push hard against it.

     I had always been afraid of dying. I’d never liked the idea of being separated from my loved ones, my cat, our parakeet, the wild rabbit that came as dusk approached to nibble clover in the back yard. I’d never liked the idea of dying and leaving my stuff behind. I had always been attached to my books and belongings, and to everything else in our house. I had always liked to touch things, to experience the solid feel of them beneath my hand. I had liked textures.

     Everything that I do manage to touch now feels cool and smooth like the blue membrane through which I attempt to feel these objects on the other side. I have to really concentrate to manipulate even the smallest object. It seems to take a lot of energy to move a teacup, to turn a page, to push a ball across a floor. My greatest triumph so far has been climbing the staircase and making one of the crystals that dangles from the bottom of a brass wall sconce sway and ring against the other crystals. A faint musical tinkling had filled my ears, as if I was hearing wind chimes hanging high up in a neighbor’s tree from three houses away, a familiar sound from my childhood I had not recalled until that moment.

     I had always thought that death would be heralded by an entourage of relatives who had passed before me gathering to escort me into the light and then to what lies beyond it in the afterlife. We had been taught that our loved ones wait for us just on the other side, just beyond the veil. Yet, I have not seen another soul since the transition from living to deceased. This aloneness is overwhelming. The confinement within the blue membrane is claustrophobic and suffocating to me. I am a restless spirit because of this human baggage that I have hauled behind me, stacked high on an invisible little red wagon. I tug the handle of that wagon and roll it along wherever I go, even up staircases and down stairwells. I can’t see it, but I can feel the weight of it shadowing me through every room.

     I had thought that there would be someone here on the other side, someone to perhaps guide me, someone to tell me what I’m supposed to do, someone to offer some advice…just someone. Instead, there is nothing here but these opaque blue walls that shift and move with beguiling fluidity, but always enshroud me.

     I can push my hand against them, press myself hard up to them and stretch the membrane thin with effort. And that is when I think I am at least partially visible to the people who now live in this house, when I stretch the membrane taut and nearly transparent, just a faint hint of blueness against my nose and forehead and my chin, at my fingertips and knees and elbows. I have tried hard to push myself through the membrane, but it is exceptionally elastic and will only keep stretching and thinning out. It will not rend. It will not give way and allow me to pass back through it into the living world.

     I have sat in dim corners hugging my knees and weeping, the blue membrane collapsed around me like a tent in a gale. I have wracked my brain to try to figure out what I am and why. Am I spirit? I believe I still look like me. I can touch my own face, explore my own familiar features, but I do not reflect in any mirror except as a faint blur of blue like a shimmer. I am in my familiar clothes, a favorite outfit from when I was younger. My hair is long again. I am the younger version of the woman who died. This was the time of my life when I was happiest, but I am not necessarily happy now. I am lonely. I am sad, morose, dejected, disheartened, discouraged, and deeply disappointed. Trapped in this rubbery, stretchy blueness, being able to see all these things on the other side of it, to be able to manipulate them just a little bit, I am exceedingly frustrated. I can pull nothing through from that other side of the membrane to this side. I have nothing here but my own self. I am bored and restless.

     This is not what I’d been led to believe death would be like. I am a haunt, a ghost. I understand that, but I do not understand the why of it. This is the house that I grew up in, the place where I was happy. This is where my memories were born. I died in a nursing home, an old lady. I am not old now. I am just confused and sad, and lonely. I am terribly lonely. And I dread when the panic attacks drive me to shrieking and trying to push through the blue membrane. I have frightened the children, startled the young woman, frightened the man when he was in the shower and I managed to press my hand against the shower curtain, moving it inward until it touched his back. I had felt him through the membrane, through the plastic curtain. All he had done was scream and shout for his wife, and it had frightened me!

     I haunt this house. I walk through the blueness, the color of sadness, the spitting image of my depression, and I try to communicate, to get someone to speak to me, to interact with me, but I seem more a nuisance than a being of interest to the family that lives on the other side of the blue membrane.

     I sit on the main staircase, morose and wondering if I will simply go mad as time continues to pass on the other side of the blue membrane while I am trapped here in my past, all alone in the house that is no longer my home with just my memories for comfort and companionship, and wondering, always wondering where every other soul is and why we cannot be with the ones we love like we’d been told when we were alive. If I'd thought life was unfair at times, then I knew nothing of unfairness. Life was always fair and good. Death, my friend, is what is truly unfair.