Ghost Tourist

by Sebastian Matthews

I have walked through this old town countless times before and felt like a ghost slipping in and out of time, with no real connection to the present but a light, tenuous grounding inside uneven footfalls on cobblestones. I was only there because my reflection echoed in the storefront windows. I feel a little like that this drizzly morning, though something has subtly shifted—more tourist now than ghost—that becomes evident as I walk. The only way to characterize this sensation is to say that something—inner makeup more than just mood, temperament in its rawest state, a little agitated, senses on high alert—has allowed me to reside in both the past and the present simultaneously. I am the white-haired 50-something guy and the pre-teen rushing out of David Cohen’s house down into his backyard driveway to shoot hoops. As I wait at the corner for the light to change, allowing a pedestrian to pass, my eyes are nearly gauged out by her low-hanging umbrella. I turn away, now facing an imprint of a burned down building left on the adjacent brick three-story, its upper windows knocked out. In my mind’s eye, both buildings remain, windows intact, and I’m standing on top of the flat roof with my bohemian brothers and sisters, ill-advisedly tossing a frisbee back and forth and drinking beers. Thirty years dissolve in an instant. Earlier, I passed The Press Room, an English-style pub we used to live beside back in late 70s. I can remember poignantly the nights spent in that smoky, dark cavern while my mother, a recently divorced young woman, hung out with her actor friends. My brother and I stayed with her in the two-room walk-up next door. I can almost make out my seven-year-old self, peering out from the smudgy window (though now the pristine panes are filled with advertisements for a beauty salon). There’s the old church graveyard that my buddy and I used to slip into, passing a joint back and forth, and the Athenaeum in the square, where the old poet shelved books and wrote his penny poems. And, just now, stopping in recognition at a street corner residence, it takes a while to recall the face of the quiet young man who I washed dishes with weekends at Café Petronella. I peer into the dusty windows and smell woodsy incense burning on the mantle, Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts spinning on the stereo. Where did that young man go? How can it be that he’s been here all along, trapped inside me?

— Portsmouth, NH

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