Maybe it was a sign: when you moved in with me, and it turned out we shared the apartment with ghosts.

At first we thought they were airplanes — just airplanes — that extinguished the sun, casting momentary darkness across the living room, like a shadowy morse code.

But then one day we came home to the handprints. They were small hands. Child’s hands. Three of them, forming a lopsided pyramid on our living room window. 

You tried to wipe them clean with a towel and they stayed. It took several swipes for us to realize that they were imprinted on the outside of the pane.

We peered out the window, down the one-story drop to the concrete alley below. What manner of child was this to have left three small handprints on the outside of our window pane, in a narrow alleyway ten feet above the ground?

We shrugged it off. It was the Mission, anything could happen here. We ate our burritos and smoked weak weed and watched infomercials till the early morning, then went to sleep in our separate rooms.

Not long after, I was reading on my bed when I heard you dragging your laundry through the hallway. Only it sounded much heavier than laundry, like you were dragging some body.

I opened my door, and you weren’t there. No one was there. I closed the door and the dragging sound resumed. I pushed a chair up against the door, then thought twice and tilted it to jam the top of its backrest under the doorknob, like I’d seen people do in movies. Frantically I fished matches from a drawer and lit three candles on my altar, willing the fire to draw good spirits and ward away the bad. 

The flames sizzled alive, and the dragging sound ceased. 

I sat on the floor in front of the altar, my body slumping in relief, until my arms suddenly began to move. My left arm began to make a wave, my right one formed a circle. What the fuck. What the fuck! I thought, as I watched my body being moved by something or some other body. I tried to freeze, I tried to spring up onto my bed, but my limbs were no longer my own.

When you came home later and I told you what had happened, you said we’d better do some ceremony or some shit to clear the air.

We never did.

We moved out. Not because of the ghosts, but because you were stealing money to pay rent and also eating all my food. 

After we’d moved, we found out that a man who used to live in that apartment had died on the stairwell outside, and that another had supposedly killed himself on the back steps. 

When I walked by the apartment a few months later and saw that it was still empty, the building manager told me the place was hard to rent because people never stayed for long.

We had become some of those people. Never staying. Always leaving. I rarely talked to you between then and when you left for good. I was pissed at you for stealing money and for lying about it and I was pissed at you for eating all my cereal and for always leaving one goddamn flake at the bottom of the box.

But mostly I was angry at you for dying. And then I was scared as hell that you came back.

***

When we first met you were wearing a suit the color of ash. 

A friend introduced us, and it was immediately a collision of like minds.  We said “nice to meet you” in one breath and started talking shit to each other in the next.  

From that point forward we were Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise. We shared laughter and singing to keep our demons at bay, wore companionship as a shroud to mask our loneliness. A dear friend later said: “He would have give his eyes for you,” and I replied,  “I would give mine first.”

***

Two particles in proximity collide 

like palm of hand and bata skin 

like sand becoming glass

chemical physics of fact 

tells us like dissolves like 

opposites entangle

dark absorbs light until

atoms flow across 

the void   nature 

abhors a vacuum

***

Shortly after we met, we joined a band. We spent so much time together that when you moved in with me, the rumor mill ground doubt to dust. 

We liked to add grist to the mill, feeding the narrow imaginations that could not envision two cis-presenting heterosexual people in a deep but platonic relationship. We made it a point to attend weddings together where we danced and posed like prom dates. 

Meanwhile our reality was this: you were my brother, and you were more. There are no sufficient words to describe our relationship on this plane. Your light kept me tethered to this world.

***

And when you left, at first there was no good explanation for why your body failed you. Rumors flew: you had overdosed, you were poisoned, someone found a lock of your hair in a plastic bag and said you’d made a deal with the devil. 

The doctors sent a piece of your heart tissue to the Centers for Disease Control, and what they found was coxsackievirus, a common virus that causes hand, foot, and mouth disease. Only in rare cases can it cause sudden death. You were one of those rare cases, a 29 year old otherwise healthy young man, a dancer, a professional mover without health insurance, who had died from a virus overwhelming your heart.  

***

These were pre-pandemic days, and perhaps because your death was so unbelievable, it was easier to believe that you would come back. 

About a month after you died I was alone in my apartment watching a Discovery Channel show on paranormal phenomena. The show had ended and the credits were rolling along with strange symphonic music. Theramins were whoozing and deep bass was thumping and then suddenly my phone rang.

“Hello?”

What I heard made my arm hair stand on end. 

“J-j-j-j-j-j-j-eeenen!” The voice on the line was stuttering, unmodulated.  

My body went cold.

“Who is this?”

“J-j-j-j-j-j-j-eeenen!”  The voice repeated, more shrill this time.

It was you. Supposedly you had taken over our friend Angela’s body. You could have asked first. Your ex-girlfriend was on the other line, explaining to me what was happening. “I think Angela’s channeling BJ,” she said. “I’m putting her, or him, back on.”

My hairs were still on end. I listened. I answered questions, then asked them. I got used to the stuttering and the unearthly prosody of the voice. 

We talked for a full half hour and by the end of the phone call I really felt that I had spoken with you a month after you died. 

You told me to marry the guy I was dating – I did. You told me to check up on our bandmate who was using again – I tried. 

Before we hung up you said we’d talk again.

***

I like to think you are now like the ghosts who inhabited our old apartment, but more settled and kinder in the way you like to haunt. 

Fast-forward one year, from the chill of San Francisco to the higher ground of Taos, New Mexico. I have been sent here by co-workers, who believe that a silent mediation retreat will break me out of a harmful cycle of depression, burnout and pain. 

Clang clang clang rings the iron bell. It’s time for evening walking meditation.  Before leaving, I walk upstairs to visit our altar to the deceased. I had forgotten a photo, so I tore a corner from the top sheet of a yellow legal pad and scrawled your name “BJ Alisago” in ballpoint pen. Embarrassed by the clumsiness of my tribute, I had placed the paper scrap, partly hidden on the farthest corner of the altar.

Now I step into the room to approach the center of the altar, but my body begins to move strangely and I suddenly recall the night in our old apartment, when something made my body dance.  

I try to walk straight toward the altar, but instead, my right leg crosses in front of my left and pushes me to the side, again, and again. For no good reason, I am doing involuntary curtsies, lurching diagonally across the room.  

When my body finally stops I am at the far corner of the alter, immediately in front of the torn yellow paper with your name.

What the hell. I say in my head.

BJ?  Are you here? 

In response, my gaze lifts to the window and there I see the grey stone fire circle in the meadow beyond the sanctuary.  

Should we go to the fire? I ask silently.

In my mind I hear the response:

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust…

You are with me. I feel glee, like a child reunited with a long lost playmate. I pick up my legs, the lurching is done, and I run downstairs and out the door. 

Contrary to the norms of walking meditation, I practically skip towards the fire circle. Weightless.  It’s as if you are running next to me with your hand on my back, lifting me up and giving me the power to glide.

This is fun! I giggle to the wind. Around me twilight is turning the sky from indigo to ink, the tree shadows converge with the mountain peaks to form darkness.

Ashes to ashes dust to dust… 

Like a mantra, these words repeat in my mind, and I feel your push on my back lighten then leave.

No, no, you can’t go I hear myself saying out loud, desperate.  Don’t leave,  I don’t want be alone again.

As I say these words, my foot hits a stone. I’ve reached the fire circle. You’ve come and gone but you are leaving your mark: a halo of ether and stardust. 

I look down at the circle: orange embers pulsing.  I look left: a dozen points of light ignite as other retreat goers turn on flashlights in near synchronicity. I turn around: the main cabin glows as the caretaker hangs two kerosene lamps from the eaves. One more turn: a fire in the sanctuary, where our meditation leader has coaxed flames to life. 

You are showing me 360 degrees of your return, the way your love leaves its prints, keeps us reaching through the void toward a space full of matter. At last my gaze moves skyward and there appears Venus, shining like the first night star.