Your Spooky Valentine
Adapted from Volume 1, Issue 11 of Highly Illogical
The ghosty thingy this week is a little bit more abstract than just a ghost story. I hope you don’t mind if I get a little philosophical.
Last week, I appeared on a podcast about Jane Austen fan fiction and for it, I read a novel in which Elizabeth Bennet is put into a coma by a carriage accident halfway through the events of Pride and Prejudice, and through a mishap of both Lizzie and Darcy making convenient wishes right before her accident, she becomes a spectre who is only visible to Darcy and cannot be more than 30 or so feet from him. Now, of course, this is a frothy light novel rife with sentimental musings on love, and that’s all well and good. But it wasn’t the sentiment that stuck with me. At the beginning of the novel, Darcy is convinced that Elizabeth’s specter is a result of his infatuation, a loving hallucination that his mind has created to soothe his fear that he will not see her again, that he’ll never get to know her. On the podcast, I pointed out that this was kind of a crazy leap in logic on Darcy’s part - but is it really?
Having recently fallen victim to a crush that will likely yield nothing but a playlist, bad poetry, and some long talks with a couple of trusted friends (which is my usual romantic MO, for the record), I relate to the feeling of being haunted by someone you would like to be emotionally intimate with but can’t quite reach. Thankfully, I am not experiencing infatuation-based hallucinations, but on a certain level, I feel like this person is always with me. I pick up a book to read and wonder what they are reading, if anything. I listen to a song and think about what they would look like listening to it with me, wonder what they’d order if they were at the same restaurant as me, try to imagine the type of commentary they’d make on the Deep Space Nine episode I’m watching, if they’d roll their eyes at Dr. Bashir as much as I do.
It sort of feels like a haunting - a presence that is tangible to me and yet entirely mysterious, creating thousands of questions and answering none, a presence I don’t know how to get rid of. I know that, for me, this haunted, never alone feeling doesn’t go away once I’m in a relationship, and especially not once that relationship ends. The song “Dearly Departed” by Shakey Graves compares lost love to a ghost pretty directly, so I know for a fact I’m not the first to have this thought. And, I mean, Ghost exists, also.
What strikes me about all of this is that love, despite being an ideally mutual and shared emotion, is still a deeply individual experience. I know what it’s like to have loved the people I have loved, but their next lover will feel differently than I did, they aren’t me. No matter how much self-reflection and self-love I practice, I will never truly know what it’s like to love and be loved by myself. Though a relationship is a combined experience, the feelings are felt and examined and re-examined and re-re-examined (if you’re me) on our own, there’s a lot about the love we feel that the objects of our affection will never know or truly understand.
I’m just thinking out loud, dear reader, but in any case, I hope whoever’s haunting you is a kind spectre. And if not, I hope you can shake them loose soon.