Ghosts Stories Keep Me Up At Night: A Personal Essay & Conversion Story
The first time I read Frankenstein, I cried for the monster.
I wiped the dust off a musty elementary school copy – a little girl victoriously clutching a book the librarian was reluctant to relinquish – and carried it as bounty to my bedroom. There, huddled in the security of my quilt, my eyes darted about the sinister corners of my pink walls in a myopic haze. The pile on my desk chair transfigured from the morning’s discarded clothing to leering leviathan and Belle’s rose nightlight to eyes as red as burning coals, forcing me to bury myself deeper into the covers the deeper I delved into my pages. With autumn rain pattering outside my window, I descended into the world of Victor Frankenstein, a mad scientist and transgressor who fashions a monster he does not understand. He glorifies science and forsakes God, yet soon laments and, justifying his evils, appeals to Him for the strength to destroy his creation. It’s odd, I wonder. Did he not discard God merely pages before?
But the monster – hot tears run down chubby cheeks as he who once admired the perfect forms of his cottagers, their grace and delicate complexions, first views himself in a pool, startled and convinced of his deformity, overcome by the bitterest sensations of despondence. It is the revelation of his isolation and the ensuing anguish which propels me to leave the book by my bedside and sleep with the lights on in dreadful silence.
He knows who to blame for his self-disgust and suffering, but if evolution has fashioned me, who might I appeal to? For my loss of words in both Russian and in English, for an immigrant’s otherness in either country, for stuttering when a teacher asks me to speak in class while others speak like poetry? For standing in a locker room and peering at the reflection in the hazy mirror, taking in eyes that are too small, cheeks too large, and a crowd of girls behind me chattering in unison, a flock of inside jokes and fitted figures. For a loss of innocence and imagining oneself as nothing less than the devil incarnate? For bits and pieces of insecurities and self-loathing stitched together on too-large limbs, adopted from deceased ancestors or contrived from relatives whispering to skip dinner, like my monster’s body knit from fragments of the dead?
You should have no business dabbling in darkness or wasting away in worlds of fiction, losing sleep in musings of fantasy and magic or tales of fear and fanaticism, my uncle tells me.
I never listen.
The trouble with the gothic is that it sneaks you away through creaking, musty castles, through suspense and horror, ancient prophecy and visions, the supernatural and sublime. Yet, the greater trouble still is that, deep into the darkness peering, you begin to contemplate the blackness.
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand,” Shelley writes.
“Where did I come from?” I wonder.
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I believed the meaning to my life was love, but that was before I knew what love was.
I stand beside a surly statue of Edgar Allan Poe in the heart of Boston as a brisk wind whips the hair about my face. A green Poe strides by his Raven, frozen in time, and our high school tour guide recalls the beginning of my favorite “fairytale” poem, “Annabel Lee” – the magic of the words, “it was many and many a year ago / in a kingdom by the sea,” and the ominous tones of “the wind [that] came out of the cloud by night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” I glance at Poe, a husband who knew loss, and consider the tale of a lover who mourns at the grave of his Annabel every night while she lies in her sepulcher.
I long for someone to love me to death, to memorialize me and my memories, to split their heart and hide me within it, stitching their wound so I might inhabit them forever. Will my life find meaning if it is grounded in another’s?
But the draughts of passion upon a heart are like one’s first taste of wine, distorting and heightening, boiling blood in veins and setting raging fires, propelling emotions, pursuits, and wild desires. The first boy I fall in love with possesses fingers which lock seamlessly with my own; my head fits snugly in the crook of his arms; my cheeks are molded for his hands. It seems we are designed for another body, created to and for love. And I do love, until I don’t.
Hopeless romanticism is masochism, for while love is a noble feeling it is a feeling, nonetheless. I fall out of love as quickly as I fell in love. Surely this boy does not know me, he only thinks he does. What if another might better satisfy this desire to be loved? All the movies I have watched end with “happily ever after” – I know only about the falling in love, and nothing of the staying.
Like Poe’s statue, I too rush down Boylston Street in pandemonium, though perhaps I am less like Poe and more like Bluebeard, with the broken hearts of boys I thought I loved placed not in sepulchers but hung on hooks from the walls of my heart – a trophy room of corpses. Insecurity and want of feeling are a disease which grows, with a symptom of steadily slaying those who cannot fulfill my wanting definition.
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks,” says Mary Shelley.
I am waiting. Waiting for someone to tell me I make sense, yet unknowable to all, especially myself. What is a “love that [is] more than love,” a love that is more than lust? I pursue boys by day while questions of purpose pursue me at night. I ruminate on the weight of love, its quality and meaning, and ache with an undefined yearning for something I cannot name, and no boy nor feeling can satiate it.
“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling – my darling – my life and my bride, / In her sepulcher there by the sea – / In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
So fleeting is Annabel Lee – human “love” is temporary. A realization creeps in that someday all I love will die, too. It is likely there will not even be a lone statue memorialized for any of it to have meant anything. What a horrible sanity when you think to bury yourself in stories of magic and mystery but have unearthed anxieties and longings. My soul shivers, though not from the bleak winter’s wind. I watch as a flurry of snow descends upon the bronzed figure and dissipates like tears on tiles.
“Why am I here?” I wonder.
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A yellow, dirty fog hangs over the city, percolating through alleys and streets like an evil breath while I skim the shelves of the illuminated Harvard Book Store. My fingers run over a soft leather copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It bears a cover strewn with gold, grandiose flourishes and magnificent cursive upon an amethyst binding. I have a ravaged copy at home, but I desperately desire this one, though I have no money with me.
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them and to dominate them,” pronounces Dorian, a passionate pledge to live the way he wishes through an immortal youth purchased with his soul.
Human morality is so meddlesome, I ponder as I look about the empty story, continuously keeping you from indulging in experiences or beautiful books you cannot afford. I recall my eight-year-old self, slipping hundreds from my father’s dresser for a Scholastic Bookfair, and my mother’s wide eyes when she learns I have squandered rent on stacks of fiction.
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them,” Wilde writes.
What is darkness anyhow, and how can you trust your mind to decide what is good and what is not? It beats the volatile way of Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, which torments the guilty party’s conscience for his murder – “Hark! Louder! Louder! Louder! Louder!” What is guilt? Why does the perpetrator surrender and shriek, “I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!” when there is no risk of being caught? What is the groan of mortal terror that consumes him in the dark?
I, too, admit to sleepless nights, beating thoughts I cannot drown out. My stomach twists in knots at my mother’s then fraught eyes, or the “I hate you”’s I screamed in the past, the violence of all the words I have carelessly spoken and the violence on my mind of those I read now.
What are words? What is murder? What is worse?
I clutch Wilde’s book, assessing my opportunity, and reason with morality. If you are on this earth, which is in itself an accident, and you yourself the accident of evolution, are not your thoughts mere accidents too – accidental by-products of random atoms? Are not the thoughts of the astronomers and scientists who have uncovered this thusly meaningless accidents? If you are in an evolutionary, nihilistic haze absent of a Moral-Law Giver, whose morality do you submit to? The morality of “accidental” thinking? Why is Dorian’s morality not the standard – the truer or the better? Perhaps those “Godly” moral rules are not restrictions, but directions for running the human machine – for not putting the wrong oil in the vehicle? Why can I not have the book?
My face flushes feverishly as I consider my course of action. Moving through the air as if through water, down, down, down I tumble deeper into the rabbit hole. Poe’s speaker penetrates the spine with slithering doubt of sanity and worldly comprehension: “But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision…I felt that I must scream or die! And now – again! – hark! Louder! Louder! Louder! Louder!”
I put Dorian back on his shelf and hasten out of the bookstore, my heart beating violently at the revelation of what I’ve almost done, confronting my pale reflection in the glass of its window as the fetid fog absorbs my soul.
How do I define right from wrong? I wonder.
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“I think I might die,” I gasp to my mother when she finds me in my apartment, convulsing and falling in and out of consciousness on a cold tile floor. My undergraduate years are plagued by assaults of abdominal spasms so erratic that I am terrified of where I might find myself when the next consumes me.
I have memorized the isolated corners of my city campus so I might safely wait out the cruelest of the onslaughts, finding refuge in a library corner no one visits.
My first undergraduate English class is “American Gothic Fiction” and I’ve never felt more at home than with my copy of Poe’s collected works as I collapse on the floor amidst the stacks and consume Lenore, a tale of mourning and loss and an exemplar of sorrow as a bereaved groom mourns his bride. Yet, Guy De Vere will not weep. His Lenore has finally left the damned Earth, though what a horror that she “ever died so young,” the speaker laments three times, her spirit “flown forever.”
How quickly life goes by, how unpredictable each death. How unpredictable the escalation of my suffering, soon leading to a year of fainting in trains, weeping on floors, and visiting the emergency room every month.
“Surgery is the only option at this point, but that will only confirm the diagnosis, not do anything to change it,” my emergency room doctor tells me.
“From grief and groan, to a golden throne,” whispers Guy De Vere.
I turn to The Raven but here, too, the messenger croaks “nevermore” and the speaker is doomed to live in the shadow of death and loss forever. Forever gone is his lover, and all other friends shall one day join in leaving him, besides the constant “friend” that is the dread. The dread that in the silence of the night lingers with me like Poe’s Raven, as I stare at streaks of moonlight darting across my ceiling, contemplating the fear of death and of oblivion.
It is a high price to pay, I begin to ponder, to live and to die in the belief that one is here by happenstance. In saying there is no God in all this universe, this infinite being of knowledge, do I not resolve myself to the role of being with infinite knowledge?
Hellish thoughts are rapping, tapping at my chamber door. Is there “only this and nothing more”? My mind cannot wrap itself ‘round “evermore.”
What happens to me when I die? I wonder.
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I stroll through Cambridge streets in celebration of my abdominal spasms having mysteriously vanished, the man that I have slowly learned to love leaning to kiss my chubby cheeks, passing bookstores in the dying light of day.
What can I make of life and death, of miracles when my father fasts and prays and diagnoses are curiously undone, of mystery, ghosts, love, the night, free-will, the meaning of it all? How much more might you never comprehend that chills the marrow of your bones?
The corners of libraries are foreboding, but the crevices of the mind somehow more so.
My life was simpler before my hellish books, in a world with no questions of purpose keeping me awake at night, no boundaries, no moral lines or their consequent remorse. It was free and I might plant whatever life I wanted, yet it gave no answer to the most important questions.
Ghost stories shall keep you up at night, but not for reasons you might think. There is something real and terrifying here, speaking to the terrifying questions in your soul. As the ghost stories and things I do not comprehend tangle in my mind, it is in the darkness that I begin to grasp the absence of the light, the juxtaposition of grotesque and arabesque birthing the sublime.
“Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream” Poe wonders, the pioneer of the American Gothic horror story converting to Christianity six weeks before his death after a lifetime of studying suffering and determining it to be the middle of the story, one which leads to an eternal resolution bearing either disturbing or divine consequence.
“Beware of where you tread,” the gothic whispers, “for beneath the rotting wood are trapdoors and mysteries that can whisk you away to places you do not mean to go. The danger lies in that you know not what you will find or what you will wonder when you do.”