“Ghost Girl” by Chanel Brenner

Ghost Girl

The moment I dropped back into my body from the ether, I was sitting in a writing class and felt myself land in my seat. It reminded me of a hypnic jerk, that feeling of falling when you’ve just fallen asleep and briefly wake, but I was fully awake. I looked around the room at new friends who had supported me since Riley died, suddenly wondering, Where am I? Who are these people? How did I get here?
It was different than the alive feeling I had when I bumped my head in the rocket ship play structure, my violent return to earth in running after Desmond shortly after his brother’s death. Now my body felt limp, like a sleeping appendage, and my surroundings looked unfamiliar. It reminded me of how I felt at a high school party sophomore year. I had switched best friends, broken up with a boyfriend, and started dating someone new all within a few weeks.
Walking up steps to the party house, “Changes” by David Bowie was booming through the open windows and door. I was buzzed on beer when I looked at my new confidants and thought, How did I get here? What am I doing with them? I want my old life back. I broke up with both of them that night and reunited with my ex-best friend and boyfriend.
When I looked around at my new comrades in writing class, I thought about the friends I had when Riley died who had vanished. I didn’t want them back. What I wanted back was my son and his mother — her solace. I didn’t know who I was now or how I fitted in with these new friends and community. I felt in-between two realities, like a luna moth emerging from a cocoon. Do moths remember being caterpillars? Do they feel like they dropped into their winged bodies from the heavens? Do they grieve their leaf-eating existence?
After the initial shock in class, I attempted to take a deep breath, but something else filled my burning lungs, laden as if with a toxic chemical that ate all the oxygen. Is this how the dead feel when their spirits no longer need air? I can’t breathe! Why can’t I breathe? I tried to relax and inhale softly and slowly but failed. My body forgot how to breathe! I looked around the packed room and then at the writer standing before the class reading her piece, but I lost her words like the static between radio stations or a video on mute. I wondered if I looked as panicked as I felt. I tapped the shoulder of a friend in class, Melanie, who was a therapist, and whispered, “Can you step out with me? I need some help.”
Without question she rose from her seat and followed me. We sat on a bench in the dim, empty lobby of the old office building. She instructed me in an even-toned voice, “Feel your feet on the ground. Feel the couch supporting your body.”
My toes returned to themselves, wriggling in gladiator sandals. I looked at my glossy-pink toenails from a recent pedicure. It’s a happy color, I had thought just days before, but now it reminded me of Pepto Bismol and nausea. She guided me to shift into parts of my body, from the crown of my head back down to my feet. I thought, I don’t want to be in this body. I want to go back to wherever it was I came from.
After, I sat in my dirty hybrid in a parking space on Wilshire Boulevard, watching cars whiz by and feeling mine rock from their speeding. I called my husband, Lee. “I’m not doing well. I don’t know if I should drive. Can you come get me?”
“I can’t. I have to work,” he said in his gruff office-voice that used to hurt my feelings early in our marriage. This was his go-to response when I was emotional or when he didn’t want to talk about something. Sure, it was true in most instances that he did have to work, but on the rare occasion he didn’t have that excuse, it would be, “I can’t deal with this now!” or an abrupt exit of a room or the house. Our therapist encouraged this after Riley died. She told us we would grieve differently and heal at a varying pace. Each of our grief journeys would be unique. “If one of you is having a good Riley day and the other wants to talk about Riley or something upsetting, it’s perfectly reasonable to say you don’t want to talk about it.” Little did she know, my husband was already an expert at emotional boundaries that maybe, in some small way, I envied. “You’ll be okay. Just breathe,” he said. “Call me when you’re home.”
“Whatever,” I blurted out, ending the call without saying goodbye, which I knew he hated. Hanging up was my go-to boundary with my mother through the years when she’d call me crying and deliver a mean soliloquy about something I did when I was a child or young adult that I couldn’t even remember. During these calls, she was irrational and wouldn’t let me speak, so I would simply hang up. When I lived in her house with my stepfather, I used to slam the door to my bedroom, fasten the hook lock that I installed, and blast the Red Hot Chili Peppers so I couldn’t hear her tirade.
Sitting in the car after hanging up on Lee, I felt the same sense of freedom. “Fuck you!” I yelled. I thought of my younger son, Desmond. I saw his blond curls and ocean-blue eyes looking for me through the gate at his preschool. It jolted me like a defibrillator. I had to pull it together for him. He needed his mom, not a grief-wrecked ghost mom. Fuck you! I yelled at her. Then I took an unconscious deep breath, and surprisingly, my lungs worked again. I can breathe! I started my car and blasted whatever song was on the radio, imagining Desmond running into my arms for one of his forceful hugs.
I remember other times throughout my life that I’ve seen my reflection and felt disconnected from it. Maybe I have always been a ghost — maybe we are all ghosts in the machines of our bodies. Maybe we have already traveled beyond physicality in previous lifetimes, reincarnating endlessly, the strangeness of each new chassis never quite fading.
It seems a lifetime ago — and just yesterday — that I’d sit crisscross-applesauce in front of a large, unframed mirror resting against my bedroom wall. The shag rug cushioned my ankles, and dust sparkled in sunlight shining through the bare window. I would survey my sunburned skin after a day at the beach, freckles sprinkling my nose and cheeks, steel-blue eyes staring back at me. Who are you? I asked the unfamiliar girl, wanting to know her, wondering if she was pretty or would become pretty. Wondering if the sunburn would turn tan and stop the kids at the beach from calling her “Casper.” Wondering if my floating thoughts resided in her awkward and distant body. If she felt me writhing in her cocoon. Was I trapped in her or was she trapped in me — a moth trapped in a caterpillar or a caterpillar fated, but afraid, to fly and take on the ghostly green of the luna’s wings, with its seeing eyes?

Chanel Brenner

Chanel Brenner is the winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry for “Smile, or Else.” She is the author of Vanilla Milk: a memoir told in poems (Silver Birch Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and an honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer Awards. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Tahoma Literary Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, HerStry, Modern Loss, The Good Men Project, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Barrow Street, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literary Mama, and others. Her poem “July 28th” won first prize in The Write Place at the Write Time’s contest, judged by Ellen Bass, and her poem “Apology” won first place in the Smartish Pace Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. In 2018, she was nominated for the Best of the Net anthology.

Headshot: Kate Haus Photography

Photo Credit: Staff