To Drink Coffee With a Ghost
Page 1
books by amanda lovelace
the
women are some kind of magic
series:
the princess saves herself in this one (#1)
the witch doesn’t burn in this one (#2)
the mermaid’s voice returns in this one (#3)
slay those dragons: a journal for writing your own story
***
the
things that h(a)unt
duology:
to make monsters out of girls (#1)
to drink coffee with a ghost (#2)
this is dedicated
to the one
who loves ketchup
as much as
i do.
trigger warning
child abuse,
eating disorders,
sexual assault,
self-harm,
violence,
cheating,
death,
gore,
blood,
trauma,
grief,
& possibly
more.
remember to practice
self-care before,
during, & after
reading.
contents
ghost-mother
ghost-daughter
sun-showers
when she thinks
i have forgotten her,
every phone
rings off the hook—
every television screen
turns to static—
every faucet
twists on & off—
every clock
strikes three a.m.—
every book
flies off the shelves—
every cabinet
swings wide open—
every stool
turns upside down—
every door
locks & unlocks itself—
every lightbulb
explodes into pieces.
i haven’t
forgotten;
there are
just some things
i choose
not to remember.
- welcome home.
whenever i think of you, i envision our little white kitchen table. inside the drywall, i imagine years of collected stories & laughter burrowed like chestnuts from stowaway squirrels. my secrets are hidden among them, too—the ones you expertly ignored so you could still look at me & see the perfect daughter who never existed. none of these memories would be complete without our coffee. so i sit down at our little white kitchen table. i pour not one but two cups. i wait & wait & wait even though i know you won’t show up to hear what i have to say.
- communication was never our strong suit.
lately, it seems like everywhere i look, i only find daughters haunted by something their mothers did to them. we tell each other that we would raise our daughters differently. we do this while wondering if our mothers made the same promises to themselves.
- ghost-mother.
you walked
underneath streetlamps
& they flickered
until they died.
you wore
watches on your wrist
& time forever
paused.
you drove
brand-new cars
& they stalled on
the freeway.
you held
my bundled-up body
& i looked up at you like
you were the sun.
- power is power even if it takes.
“you were an accident,”
she said.
-it always sounded like “the thing that ruined everything.”
you wanted me to adore you most of all, so you handed me prettily wrapped lies in the hopes that i would hesitate before trusting anyone besides you.
- not even myself.
while i was growing bigger & bigger inside your stomach, you still decided to smoke your cigarettes each & every day. “it was normal back then,” you explained to me once. “no one knew how dangerous it was. no one knew it could kill.”
-even if you knew, it wouldn’t have changed anything.
i wonder if anyone would be surprised to find out that i came out of you searching for the scent of smoke, which really just ended up being the smell of you.
- something toxic.
the little girl was so desperate to feel loved, to feel like she existed at all, that she took anything she could get, even if it was nothing but a bunch of make-believe.
- don’t accept scraps.
i watched
a
strange man
punch
a hole
through
our family.
i watched
you
hold his hand
& do nothing
as he pushed
your children
through it.
- aren’t mothers supposed to protect?
you
had me
rehearse
the tales
that would
protect
you.
- white lies.
&
you were
shocked
when i started
telling tales
to protect
myself.
- red lies.
relationships fail. people break up. families completely collapse in on themselves, folding up at the spine like a bedtime story finished much too soon. but what those bedtime stories fail to do is prepare us for any of it.
- some lessons we must learn for ourselves.
she was
like a
mother
when
she
should have
just been
my
sister.
- thank you for your sacrifice.
she
was busy
hiding
her bruises
while
i was busy
hiding
my tears.
- we were all each other had.
your
mother
taught you
to hate your
body,
- family heirloom.
so
you
taught me
to hate my
body.
- family heirloom II.
it wasn’t long
before i realized
i could never be
who you always
wanted me
to be.
- i tried desperately to be her anyway.
what
you
told me
after
you saw
the
thin lines
on
my wrist.
- “depression doesn’t exist.”
i used to turn to you. with scraped knees. with paper-cut fingers. with battle wounds from playground wars. then things changed & i didn’t feel like i could do that anymore, so i turned to people who knew exactly what i was going through.
help, i cut myself so deep i t
hink i may have to go to the emergency room.
help, i haven’t eaten in two days & i’m afraid i’ll die if i don’t & also if i do.
help, he touched me & i still feel his fingers.
when you found out, you locked me up. buried the key someplace you forgot about. you gave my pain a name & it sounded like rebellion, not depression. no one ever bothered to tell you about the sad type of daughter & you did everything possible not to see her.
- blindfold.
you did not have a medicine spoon filled with poison. you had no gun. no knife. no ax. no belt. no ready hand. however, the weapon you did wield proved to be equally as dangerous.
- your words.
if i didn’t
lose weight,
you said
i was
disgusting.
- there was never any winning with you.
if i lost
too much weight,
you said
i was
disgusting.
- there was never any winning with you II.
your best friend.
your fear.
- they can be one in the same.
everything i love, i love because you taught me to. when you decided i was finally old enough, you gave me my first deck of tarot cards for my birthday. you told me, these aren’t magick. not by themselves. they’re magick because your hands are the ones holding them.
- my high priestess.
most of the time, the person who hurts you is the person who makes your face light up more than the moon at full brightness. they can even be the person who takes you out for your favorite dessert after you’ve had an awful day. or the person who teaches you the names of crystals. or the person who shows you which offerings to make faeries to get them on your side.
- it’s not your fault that you trusted them.
you gave me
this great
escape—
shelves
& shelves
of adventures—
but i used them
to escape
you.
- books upon books upon books.
i walk
the thin line
between
nostalgia
& trauma,
never fully
knowing
the difference.
- maybe there is none.
if poetry showed me how to bleed without the demand of blood, then why do i keep picking open all my old wounds just to get some red on the page?
- my ledger.
I.a noun.
II.one word.
III.five letters.
IV.two syllables.
V.a shot to the lung.
- cancer.
i watched you
throw up from chemo.
deteriorate from radiation.
lose every hair.
grow bedsores.
become unrecognizable.
confuse me for others.
clutch your dusty rosary.
receive last rites.
(twice).
- going . . . going . . . gone.
you suffered for so long no one believed it would ever end.
- nobody deserves that kind of pain.
there is a kind of cold you’re overcome with when you see your first dead body & it has nothing to do with the temperature outside. you keep that cold with you for the rest of your life. it reminds you to live your life more cautiously. to cherish every autumn sunrise & every smile from a loved one. you never know what you’ll be allowed to bring with you into the unknown.
- what if it’s nothing?
what do we do
with all the things
we need to say
to someone
we’ll never see
again?
- maybe that’s why i write.
the july before you left, it rained every fucking day. everything in your precious garden drowned.
- how can life be over so quickly?
one minute, you were here; the next, you had already gone. now i’m terrified to leave a room without saying goodbye to everyone inside of it first.
- what if they disappear like you did?
i wake up
because
i think
i hear you
calling
my name.
i know it
can’t be real
because
you died
without
remembering it.
- it was just wishful thinking.
you cannot
have a funeral
for your mother
without also
having a funeral
for yourself.
- it’s time to begin the procession.
i wish
i had known
i was never
going to
see you again
because i would have
spent more time
clinging to the good
we did have
instead of
clinging to the bad
i couldn’t
change.
- what eats me alive.
for months,
i dream that
you aren’t
really
dead—
that
they made
some sort
of horrible
mistake
by
declaring
you dead &
turning you
to ash
&
you get to
come back
home
now.
- it feels more like a nightmare.
she learned
that dead moms
were not just
a thing that
happened to
characters
in her favorite
fairy tales.
it happened to
girls like her, too,
but the
difference was
there was no
omniscient narrator
to teach her how
to navigate it.
- the cracked compass.
“what will she do without a mommy?”
the little girl asked.
- i still don’t know.
celebrities died. pets died. even distant relatives died. back then, grief seemed so easy, effortless. so meaningful, even hopeful. nowadays, grief is so fucking messy. grief is an off-white coffee mug with fading green rings around the top in the far- left corner of the kitchen cabinet, spider webs filling it to the brim, & no, i can’t just throw it away even though you’ve been gone for years because how would you ever forgive me for that?
- sometimes there is no meaning.
i wonder what you would say if you saw me now. you were the one who passed on, but i’m the one who forgot what it was to live. i barely sleep & all the flesh is falling off my bones & my books—all my beloved books—are coated in inches of dust, unread. here i am, somehow managing to be more haunted house than girl.
- ghost-daughter.
“i only ever wanted to keep you safe,”
you screamed.
“then why didn’t you?”
i cried.
- lucid.
remember
back when
we always
stayed up
way too late
watching
&nbs
p; our favorite
ghost shows
on tv?
-now you’re the ghost story & i can’t bring myself to watch those shows anymore.
without you,
it’s lonely.
- it doesn’t have to make sense.
without you,
it’s liberating.
- it doesn’t have to make sense II.
i’m afraid i’ll be just like you.
i’m afraid i’ll be nothing like you.
- my empress in reverse.
i used to tell people you were the lorelai to my rory. the ultimate package: not just mother & daughter, but the best of friends. as i grow older, i wonder how many times rory went to bed feeling empty, wishing for a mother, & just that—a mother. for that someone who would tell her what she needed to do when life was just too much to handle without ever expecting anything from her in return.
- chasing emily.
even
the old
coffee-ring
stains
on the tables
at cafés
remind me
of you.
- you’re everywhere & nowhere all at once.
i tell everyone i can’t bake & what i mean to say is that i won’t bake. before you got really, really sick, you tried to teach me everything you possibly could. even though you were confident that you would beat it, i think you knew you were quickly running out of time & we had to squeeze a lifetime of lessons into a year. now, i can’t taste burnt chocolate chip cookies without thinking of you.