I’ve never been a full-on believer in the supernatural and all that kooky spooky talk, but I know ghosts. I believe it is important not to talk to spirits for too long because they can make us forget we’re alive. I saw my first body at 16 and found my mother dead when I was 24. The delirious truth of death became a fixed part of my being, an ever-present state of mourning that isn’t unpleasant or pleasant; it is not numbness and it is not painful.

I’m still hunting down the English word for that spectrum of feeling.

I also cannot stress enough the significance of being raised in a Baptist church on one’s view of the world, especially for the creative mind. There is something very witchy about Baptist churches or perhaps just the ritual of organized religion. There are altars, an emphasis on sacrifice and judgment. My consciousness developed in this rhetorical environment of crucifixion, obsession, tears, testimony, and of course offerings. We talked about eating the body of Christ for communion, of being married to Jesus. The concept of eating and fucking the Lord is some wild shit. Not only that, but the Bible is full of extraordinary women: one received a severed head on a platter, one birthed the divine independent of a man, and some devoted their lives and babies to one another in ways that feel beyond the demands of a god. It’s fascinating when you read it. I read it. I just didn’t believe it the way I was supposed to do.

This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE

When I was young, I believed I would travel the country with my cousin Travis in a van. I’m not sure if I ever spoke that assumption in words. I haven’t spoken to my cousin in many years, not because of feuds or misunderstandings or forgetfulness, just the unpredictable trauma of growing up. I miss him. I miss a lot of people and playgrounds, Saturdays in June, homemade popsicles and voices I’ll never hear again. Putting together fictional rooms and people permits me access to lost spaces.

I taught Sunday school when I was 20 and 21 at New Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church. I didn’t do it because I loved teaching or the Lord. I did it because I loved my mother, and she wanted me to do this for her. We give like that when we love. We’ll give up faith, body, eyesight, memory, and future for it.

Aside from love, there is something to the cruelty human beings inflict on one another, something mathematical, so consistent it is like blood, perfect, stored up, waiting to remind us of our fragility. To witness violence is to know that fragility, how we can be torn open, left undone. There is a connection between violence and life so undeniable that I watch people lose their minds trying to block out the trauma of it all. Writing provides a highway to navigate joy and tragedy where everything is in the rearview mirror, distorted but accessible. I remember watching my mother’s body sealed into a stone crypt and feeling paralyzed by the thought of how the day could turn to this, how could we do this to her.

Questions are all art is, really. The answers aren’t the point.

I commune with memories of people. Maybe they are my ghosts or maybe they have more agency, a will outside of my own. Writing feels like that, like being a medium to other histories and futures that can help us know how to be where we are. I belong to a lot of communities, Black and queer and feminine and mighty and generous. I do not speak for them. I speak to them and anyone who wants to listen and know me and what I see.

My stories are an integration of my history, my family, my understanding of what it means to draw breath, willingly, over and over, an archive of an ever-growing inventory of lost things. Maybe my ghosts are just ethereal balloons of the subconscious, which we all have. Maybe artists have special tools to embrace the haunting.•