Ghost 6

I conceived a great poem of the night. Among the clutter of comic-books, the light-slanted shade, the crumby carpets, the empty bed. I realised, significantly and triumphantly, over days and months, that I had lost something great. I had been living, not with knowledge of her, but with the exaggerated image of her beauty, a phantom looming large in my imagination but at the same time corrupted, despicably remote. It was a phantom I still expected to see outside, in the blue evening, from my bedroom window, traipsing listlessly across vacant lots and railway yards. I realized that the most affecting and valid word in all of our language is "loss". Loss of beauty, loss of love, loss of life. I watched it recede, day by day, hour by hour, and every day as the evening wore on I confronted it, examined it, let it affect me fully. And after all the sorrows and self-recriminations had worn away, I felt somehow alive, warmed, exalting in the death of love. And that word contained nothing now for me but loss, repeated a hundred times over, as my eyes looked forward, piercing the furthest extremities of the night.

I now saw it in terms of universal loss, loss intensified till it became acutely, exactly nothing. Loneliness is such an unbearably, oddly beautiful thing. And so, I turned my eyes again to her phantom, an image that had long ceased to bear any resemblance to reality, but was just that, a phantom, a last remembrance. Her face in my mind was turned away from me and deathly-white, her frozen black hair obscuring her mouth, but a mouth which would be screwed-up bitterly. In my imagination she always appeared in the evening, and was made of night, and was always remote, and was always alone, answering by her steps and sighs the beats of my heart.