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ghosts
Mikaela Kimpton

the night air smells of clementines, fresh laundry, lilac and lemons 
and perhaps the whiff of a threatened skunk 
and Old Spice Timber deodorant 
but no longer of constant campfire 
which permeated the breeze and beseeched nostrils 
​oh, many seasons ago, now

yet also yesterday. 

i remember when the hills burned 
but now the soft zephyrs alert rain 
how evanescent is death and yet still subjugated by the transience of that which is living
it’s velvet 2am and the world sleeps 

but i walk not alone under the fluorescent street lights 

i grew up in an old haunted New England town that no one has heard of 
even though it’s a mere hour away from the site of The Conjuring 
(and itself frequented by many in the lively summers seeking the sparkling sea)
but winters are far longer and 

i’m no stranger to things that walk at night 
routine consisting of covers meticulously gathered around the pale countenance of a 7-year-old girl
like the moon swaddled in cotton sheets 

as she drifts off to sleep while the house groans 
but she is alone 
even if her racing heart doesn’t feel like it 

i didn’t face the reaper then 
but i did at 12 
in the form of a small frog on my ankle in the dark of the teeming depths of the dripping rainforest i
silently made peace with my life before looking calmly down 

as my parents tepidly discussed real estate 
i was not alone yet i was 
those seconds passed like oil through honey 
deafeningly quiet and electrically slow 

but the universe decided it was not my time 
that suffocating night 
the frog was not mottled with the vibrant colors of death 
the cool cascade of relief pouring down my forearms and returning feeling to my feet i
just wish i handled loss of things outside myself with the same grace 

for, i mean, 
how can you mourn the living?
it is in my opinion that we grieve not for our inescapable eventual loss of self as it is
— as far as we know — 

not we who have to make acquaintance with it 
but the affliction we bear as witnesses aware of the passing of beautiful things 

Sigmund Freud once wrote in his essay ‘On Transience’: 
“a flower that blossoms only for a single night 
does not seem to us on that account less lovely” 
though whimsically philosophical in premise it exhibits allusion 
to economic statutes 
of my own callously rational liberal arts discipline 
constructed on neoclassical calculations 
(freely but forcibly chosen) 
for the psychologist claims 
perhaps what renders things intrinsically beautiful 
is their own inherent scarcity of existence; 
is human experience just a marketplace? 
is love merely a transaction? 

on any account 
i pirouetted that very veil several more times 
though never quite as vividly 
at least that i can recall 
as i waltzed with ephemerality 
of my own existence while still sentient to do so
 

but when i gazed into that midnight chasm 
solely containing a countless multiplicity of swirling stars 
only infinity and my reflection stared back 
a hall of mirrors of the self 
tossing tangerines into oblivion 
on Mulholland Drive 
above a City of Stars, beneath an empty sky
 

and i dance through Wikipedia rabbit holes of general relativity 
and quantum entanglement 
forever in a second and a second that lasts forever 
how can that which is lost to us still keep our constant company? 
perhaps it is only our curse of linearity 
and self-referential perception of impermanence 
or merely feverish delusion… 
because now i smell embers and fresh timber and feel ambiguously familiar warmth beside me
​where are the rain and lilacs? 

do you believe in ghosts?
​

Creative nonfiction prose
Mikaela is a senior economics major at Pomona who has always been enamored with writing poetry (though should be writing her thesis).

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