Summer is a strange, hazy season, full of dreams, parties, and half-made plans. In Durham, the air hangs heavy with the scent of magnolias and sweat.
For me, though, summer is when the ghosts come out.
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When I was 19, a high school friend called me while I was studying for my fall semester finals. “Did you hear about Mike?” she asked.
It was raining outside, and rain always made me miss the desert. “No,” I said. “What about him?”
Silence crackled over the line. “He’s dead,” she said. “He jumped out of a window.”
It was his first semester at an acting college in New York City. Mike was sweet and a little slow, but he’d followed his dreams from Chandler, Arizona, all the way to the east coast. One night in Brooklyn, he ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms and leapt from the ninth floor of his dorm. Some friends said he was seized by inescapable paranoia. Other friends said he thought he could fly.
That summer, I found myself pacing the concrete streets of Bushwick. I was there for a storytelling theater internship through Duke in New York, but my mind was caught up in an endless litany of Michael, Michael, Michael. I wrote letters to him on the subway and stayed up all night staring at the city lights, wondering what his last thoughts were. I read Truman Capote and became obsessed with the stories that people convince themselves are true.
For my final Duke in New York project, I haunted theaters, coffee shops, and bars, notepad in hand, accosting patrons and buying them drinks. Tell me a story, I said. Tell me your story. Tell me how you got here, why you’ve stayed, and what you want.
So they gave me origin stories, family stories, random anecdotes. They told me about what Bushwick had been like back when their grandparents were young. They gave me the pieces of their lives that they remembered the most, the ones they couldn’t forget. I wrote each one of them down carefully. The last story I wrote down from memory was Mike’s.
Tell me your stories. Give me your ghosts. Tell me, tell me.
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I write constantly: on buses, in class; in a notebook, on my cellphone. I write exclusively speculative fiction, because that’s the medium that works for me. My stories are fantastical, sure, but they’re always about the real issues I’m most passionate about, the ones I can’t and won’t ignore: domestic violence, racism, rape culture, police brutality, homophobia, cruelty born from self-hatred, and all of their permutations.
It’s when I can’t write that I feel least complete. I feel disjointed, unable to think or process, only able to live on one note of existence. That note is GO, without any thought or feeling. Empathy has fled. I can’t remember who or what I’m supposed to care about. The disconnect is terrifying.
Dark fiction doesn’t scare me. If anything, I think it’s a truer reflection of humanity’s ugliness. But it is also a way to face that ugliness, to process the realities of life and death, and to work out the issues that you’re struggling with through a different lens.
It is not therapy, but it is therapeutic.
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After that, it was one after the other. Loss after loss, always in the summertime. The accidents piled up so fast that they became a blur, a whirlwind of impossibilities that had breached the surface of real life.
Grief is numbing, and it can become all-consuming.
Summer is a difficult time for me. It means another birthday, another month of sitting quietly with the memories of kids who will never turn another year older, watching Facebook alerts light up my computer. Wish Michael a happy birthday. Patrick is 23 today. Marc’s birthday is coming up, would you like to get him a present?
Writing something for them is my way of putting them to rest. It’s a retroactive chance to say goodbye.
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My heart is full of ghosts.
My next short fiction piece, "Scarecrow," comes out in Black Static this September. It's about transformation, walking the fine line between love and murder, and the way guilt will eat you from the inside out. In a lot of ways, too, it’s the story of a boy I met when I was 11 and lost not long after that. My first ghost story for my first ghost.
Ever so often, my mom asks me, “Why do you have to write about such dark things? Why can’t you write about something good, true, and edifying?”
Because dark fiction rises from dark places, and the world is a dark, true place.
I write to process loss, to express frustration, to reframe and better understand the things I care about. I write because there are terrible things happening across the globe, in our own neighborhoods, across from you in the subway. I write, too, because life is full of moments of simple and effervescent joy, and because those moments are worth remembering.
Deep down, I am still in mourning. And perhaps I write for the dead because, as selfish as it seems, I know that by doing so, I’ll be able to keep a small piece of their humanity for myself.
Alyssa Wong, Trinity ’13, majored in English and Theater Studies. Currently, she is a writer living in New York, New York.
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