Ghosts

Last weekend my friend Johnny Napoli came to visit me, and no, he is not a comic book superhero, despite his name. On Sunday we found the most beautiful place in my town. Driven from my relatives’ house by overload of little girl-ness, we meant to walk to a nearby school to play frisbee on their sports field. Instead we ended up scaling a hill at the end of the road, a completely bald grassy protrusion that was so high and sudden and anomalous in the area’s topography that I would have taken it for a covered landfill had I not known for sure that garbage here is not disposed of in any official manner.

The hill was so pointy that running around on it we were like two little bugs on someone’s fingertip. If we distanced ourselves by 100 feet, neither of us could see the other because of the hilltop in the way. To the west of the hill, Aksukent’s tin roofs reflected the setting sun. To the east, snowcapped mountains glowed. A half-mile to the south, cows and sheep grazed on a ridge.

As always, when something interesting is going on, kids came to investigate. After a few minutes they were all playing with us. A kindergartner named Islam threw like a pro, even though the disc was practically the size of his whole body. By the time Damir called to tell me the barbeque was lit, they must have chased the errant disc down the entire hill fifteen or twenty times.

Raking light and elevation are an intoxicating combination. That night and that hill were a balm. The academic year is nearing an end, and for some reason I’m not lightened by the prospect of summer but rather deprived of the ascetic grit that got me through the winter. I see phantoms, or rather, I smell them: dinner wafts up from the kitchen and I can swear it’s pesto or roast chicken or grilled vegetables (it’s meat and potatoes). For one whole week I was obsessed with the idea of a tuna melt. It was like being in love; all I could think about was the utter perfection of tuna, olive oil, and sharp cheddar. Sometimes I eat spoonfuls of raspberry jam and they taste like grapefruit.

It’s only very rarely that I have the feeling of missing anyone or anything. Generally, what I mean by “I miss you” is “I love you”. Maybe it’s my disposition, or my age, or my life’s trajectory, but for whatever reason I am usually too caught up in the present or future to experience pure longing.

Perhaps that’s why the things that lack in my life simply appear to me, in the present, as flickering realities. I was sitting on a bench one morning in the center of town, and a woman’s swishing skirt and high heels swept Italy onto a patch of the sidewalk. For a moment, she was walking on cobblestones and wearing real leather shoes. There was the tinny honking of scooters and rumbling latin voices, and then it was gone.

The time before that wasn’t visual, it was a feeling: one day, for the last few hours at work I had a strange sensation that I couldn’t quite place, until it finally occurred to me that I was anticipating the concert I was going to that night (do I have to write it? There was no concert).

Of course I have woken up in my childhood bedroom several times, but the phantoms are always more intense when I’m moving, like when I was jogging down a forested hill one morning and was hit with the bizarre certainty that if I ran just a little faster I’d turn the corner and slip into one of my running trails from college.

I’m training for a marathon to be run in Istanbul in October (khuda hohlasi!). I try to keep track of my mileage, but having no accurate way to measure distance I’ve started measuring in terms of destination. An hour-long run takes me to the river and back. A run to Mankent is pretty long. To Shimkent is a marathon. Last Sunday, I got up early and ran to my friend’s house in Karabulak, a neighboring village. When I got to her house, I splashed myself with water, put on one of her house-dresses, and took a nap. When I woke up she fed me soup. The whole rest of the day all I could think was: two Karabulaks is a marathon! I hope, by October, it will be the opposite: the marathon will just seem like two Karabulaks.

In other news, fruit trees are fruiting, flies are buzzing, buses are smelly: the season of ubiquitous pregnancy and endless weddings has begun.