12
I return to my own home in tears. The area surrounding my house has been turned into a forest by my neighbors, but it is not populated by trees: human organs and tendons tower overhead, blood veins serve as vines, and a canopy of human hair hangs as leaves above. Souls miss humanity so much, they often surround themselves with mocked-up images of flesh and bone and blood. We can’t help it: we miss ourselves.
I avoid Cooper for a while, just to think. One of the strangest things about my new (un)life is how much I miss myself. I miss everyone else more than life itself (ha!), but I also miss the hell out of just being human. I miss reaching down and having an arm to pinch to watch my skin turn red and show that I had blood within me. That’s why I started dropping reminders on people, peppering their lives with mementos of me, just to prove that a girl named Summer Johnson had lived and had been loved. They suspected I was doing this, but they told themselves they were crazy and ignored the evidence. But I did not mind: they were still thinking of me. Their lives would be long and hard, and I needed to keep my memory fresh so I would not be forgotten. When I arranged for my mom to find a forgotten piece of pottery I’d made in elementary school on the kitchen counter, as if it had just dropped from the sky, she thought of me. When I made Cooper reach into his glove box and find a poem I’d written about our summer, he thought of me. When I left my favorite purple hairbrush in my brother’s bathroom, he thought of me. This is the magic that forgotten souls spin to beg the ones they left behind to remember them. Ghosts praying to be fleshed out again: history has never known a sweeter sadness. But I will keep my memory alive. I have to.
And oh, to be human again. To be loved again, instead of Lily. Now that I was nothing but a spirit looking back on my time as a girl, my whole life was a highlight reel. Although my life did contain sadness and depression and anger, all that was suddenly washed away in the rearview mirror, and what really stuck out to me now were the happy moments, and how much of them there truly were, and how much more important and meaningful they were than all the tears. It was astounding, just how much I had taken for granted, and how many smiles I could see through the prism of death. Only from the angle of the departed could I see what humans never could: that they are the ones that matter. They are so precious and lost and beautiful and special, the ones with air in their lungs, the ones that can still laugh and dance and write their own tickets through life. The departed can be massively smug with the universal knowledge they have been bestowed with, but the truth we run from is that we are just a whisper of what was, an echo of a wasted opportunity. We are nothing. Down there on Earth, that is where the treasure lies. This is the miracle of a secular world: a human heart that is able to beat and feel and fall into everlasting love and then push it away again just as quickly. The ability to fail and flounder and trip and astound: this is the immortal magic of the cosmos. This is the platinum of the universe. That is where you should put your faith, down there with those lost and enlightened and beautifully oblivious creatures, even when they infuriate you. I just wish I would’ve realized it sooner.
And soon something happens that makes me feel, for the first time, like I am nearly home again: I see my first family member in the grey area since Mam. But it wasn’t exactly who I’d expected to see.
My great uncle, Gary Johnson, could remember the very first moment he knew his soul was female, regardless of what appendages nature had stuck him with. His kindergarten teacher told the class to line up for a bathroom visit down the hall when the commode in their classroom broke, girls in one line, boys in the other. He lined up with the girls and was swiftly slapped in the face. A year later his mother tried to sign him up for soccer, and when he walked out into the living room for his first practice, he was wearing a tutu, defiant in pink. Mortified, his father beat him with a stick. That was the last time little Gary ever dressed as Gigi. He married a woman and had three children, choked by lies all the while. By the time his children reached college, he was wearing maxi dresses in private. His family knew, of course, but their minds could not accept this, and they drifted away. He separated from his wife at sixty and then quietly started dipping his toes into coming out as transgender, wearing bits of female jewelry here and there.
When I come across Gary (now known as Gigi) in the grey area, I am shown a scene that takes my breath away. We embrace, and I am yanked into a memory wormhole. I float down into the past and suddenly I am pulled into a window and then dropped directly into my family’s Thanksgiving celebration, 2006. I breathe in the warm air, even though it is useless. Crowded into my mother’s cramped dining room is a ragtag collection of aunts and uncles and stragglers, except nobody knew that one of my dad’s uncles wasn’t an uncle at all. In Uncle Gary’s heart, he was Aunt Gigi. And I failed Gigi on this day. I can feel it everywhere. Because this wasn’t a normal Thanksgiving, you see. This was supposed to be Gary’s first big moment in a white blouse and a pearl necklace, and he couldn’t have been more thrilled. Finally a safe audience. Finally a room that would accept him.
But fate would not let this happen. Robert, a cousin with a small brain and a closed-up heart, noticed the necklace and gave Gary a strange look. “Hey, what’s the deal, Big Gary?” he asked as half my aunts blushed and looked away, mortified, and the other half let out nervous chuckles. “Or should I call you Gareesha? You got some news to drop, big boy?”
Gary cleared his throat, his fantasies of acceptance, and of a world that would love him without strings attached, fading into his chest. He flashed a tight smile, trying to play along. (Humans were born smiling with their teeth, and the fact that they grew to close their mouths and simply smirk with their lips when they were adults revealed everything about the world they had created for themselves.)
“I, uh…well, the thing is…”
“What,” Robert laughed, “you gonna move to San Francisco on us and start wearing those fishnet shirts I see on the news? Is that what’s going on? Hey – somebody check if he’s wearing boxers, or a thong!”
Nervous silence filled the room as the heckler laughed at himself, and soon Gary got up and fled to the restroom. Not one person in my family stood up for him, including me. Although I was raised in the South, I was a fairly progressive thinker, but it was still risky to show that. I was afraid to put myself out there, just like everyone else. So I turned another cheek just like the rest of my family while Gary suffered two rooms away.
Now that I was a ghost, I got up against my own ear and started screaming: HIS SOUL LOOKS JUST LIKE YOURS! NONE OF THIS MATTERS! GIVE HIM LOVE! RISE ABOVE THESE PEOPLE! BE BRAVE!
I felt like exploding with eons of anger as I watched my former self sit and stare at the walls, enveloped in fear. How could I have been so weak? But there was nothing I could do. This had already happened, and I was simply watching a memory. This was unfixable.
After dessert I watched my former self walk by a doorway on the way to the bathroom. Suddenly I saw myself notice Gary crying in my little brother’s empty bedroom, hiding his tears with the sleeve of his shirt, his necklace suddenly gone, and could you guess what I did next? I did nothing. I did the easy thing – I pretended I didn’t see and kept walking. I pretended I was oblivious. As a ghost, I could see my thoughts within my human brain so well: I was scared. I was trying to protect myself. But I was wrong. I should’ve given him love, offered acceptance, a kind word, and I didn’t. And I would never be able to take that back.
My Aunt Gigi was found hanging from the rafters of her toolshed on a chilly January morning eight weeks later. She died in a blue tracksuit, as she didn’t want her daughters to find her in her preferred clothing and become even more upset than they already would. They buried her in a dress, though, making her funeral her first and last public appearance as herself in her true form, her shoulder-length hair brushed out and flowing at last. And when her daughters filled out the paperwork for her gravestone, tears stained the page as they wrote Beloved mother, sister and friend, Gigi.
I was elated to see Gigi up here. She still had people to wait for, so she was sticking around for a while. The cosmos was in a good mood that day, smiling down on delayed and deserved freedom, and a thousand suns were shining. I hugged her tight and complimented her long, lustrous hair, and then she twirled for me in her lavender dress, laughing all the while. I threw rose petals on her while she danced. I didn’t have to say sorry about that November night, because she knew. She understood. Humans are so small, and so dominated by fear. But still, that didn’t mean I didn’t regret my actions with all the fire in my new and expanded universe. Because humanity is precious, whether it is draped in a dress or a business suit or a garbage bag. This was all so clear to me now. The package is not defined by the bow on top, but the gift within – and humans are gifts. How many more humans will have to live and die in darkness before they become accepting and loving enough to forget their own fears and prejudices and let each other step into the sun?
At the end of our time together, I asked Gigi if she regretted dying early, and she just shook her head. I asked her why, and then she pointed at the love of her life, a man named Jim who had apparently died a decade before her. Jim was floating at the edge of the grey area, waiting for her, smiling.
“Because you don’t know how much I missed him,” Gigi smiled, “and how good it felt to finally hug him again when I died.”
~
As I watch and learn, humanity goes on. Life ends. Life begins again. Planets travel around suns. Suns whirl around galaxies. And to get my mind off certain coming events, I go Dreamskipping. Imagine going kite surfing on dreams. Just picture riding the winds of the human spirit up and over the most secret and urgent and private wishes, skipping from one dream to another like the crests of waves, seeing all that exists within the human soul, both glorious and abominable. This is Dreamskipping. Most of us do this when we feel especially Lifesick, sift back down to Earth and jump from brain to brain while the humans sleep, just to get a glimpse into what being trapped inside a human body felt like again. We cannot feel emotion with the same intensity as humans, so it is a vague glimpse – a whisper of what once was. But still, we take what we can get up here.
Dreams are the only reality most humans will ever experience, and fantasies contain the only lives many people will ever get to live. Dreams are the only place where humans are unrestricted by fear and self-doubt and their bodies and all the other things that bog them down as a species. They are where a little girl in a tutu is finally brave enough to climb up onstage and belt out those Broadway hits for her smiling family; where a teen boy with leg braces is able to run that race and watch his parents cheer from the stands, loud and proud. They are the only place where blue-haired old women can rejoin their decades-gone husbands at that officer’s dance in Germany during the war that they’d enjoyed so much; where a middle-aged executive can hug his teenaged Golden Retriever one last time and finally say goodbye, since he’d viewed touching him as feminine all those years ago. I have seen millions of human dreams, and they are gorgeous and glittering and shattering. Paraplegics win beauty pageants in razzle-dazzle gowns, orphans walk home from school and find a set of smiling parents making lunch. People love, and they are loved in return. There is no fear. All is clean and bright.
But today on Earth it is dark and stormy where I am Dreamskipping, so most of the dreams are morose in tone and nature. It is amazing how easily influenced humans are by things like the weather and the seasons, how truly fragile their moods really are. Today the mood borders on black, but there are still pockets of light. It says so much, what people see when they close their eyes. They cannot run from the darkness. I almost feel guilty, observing scenes of such bracing honesty. But not guilty enough. We are jealous of their ability to sleep and dream, and we want in on the action. On this night I see wishes big and small, I feel desires vast and simple. I see little girls waddling through Kmart with their fathers at their side to purchase the My Size Barbies of their television commercial dreams, I see African boys reuniting with their deceased brothers and flying kites together that soar so high, they melt in the sun. I see housewives finally receiving the steak knives they ordered from an Internet company so they can kill their husbands in their sleep, I see old men reuniting with their wives who have recently passed, running forward and embracing on the deck of a 1940s ship as the crowd roars and applauds, young and whole and healthy again.
And the nightmares – oh, the nightmares. I see tentacle’d monsters creeping out of closet doors, I see mothers slapping their children in the face and daring them to report it to authorities, I see imagined killers lurking outside bedroom windows, watching and waiting. What horror the human mind is capable of creating when it has been put through the ringer. And this, I think, is the ultimate crux of humanity: repression. They dream of the things they either crave or abhor, because it is during their waking hours that they go back to the middle and settle on a grey prairie of a life. They do not get to live in the horrors and fantasies of their dreams until they cross over and get up here, and by then it is too late anyway.
Saddest of all, I see a little girl with snow-blonde hair waking up in her dream and seeing a father smiling at her, the same father who left her when she was in diapers. The father’s face is blurred because the girl’s little mind is already forgetting him. But still, she is trying to remember. She wants to remember, and that tells me everything I need to know. So I send a beacon to the girl’s father to remind him of his daughter, and then I hope for the best. I cannot easily tamper with free will, but I pray he will go back to her. And then I prepare to fly out of there. Enough humanity for today. They are making such a mess, and I would rather not see it.
I am on my way out, and then I see it: me. I am in a casket. No warm blood to be found. There is a sparkle from my finger, I suppose from my death jewelry I have been adorned with. And the memory within the dream is wrecked, frantic, burned-out.
Oh, Cooper. I am seeing his dreams. How stupid am I? My memory is not keeping him going, it is haunting him. And this is the worst time of all for him to be depressed – his wedding is tomorrow.