The new woman I’m talking to says she feels Mandy. She never met Mandy while they were alive, but she wants to do a grief ceremony with me and thinks Mandy is skeptical of her; she imagines Mandy saying, “Game recognize game, but if you hurt my friend, I will HAUNT you.” Those were the words the new woman used, and they sound like Mandy—especially that last clause.

I don’t really remember what a clause is, if I’m being honest. I looked it up, and one thing said, “The subject of the clause is the [with cartoon images of a person, a place, and a thing] …performing the action in the sentence; the predicate describes the action the subject performs.” This is interesting because it’s what the new woman and I are doing in messages, sometimes for hours when we’re supposed to be working—describing what we’ll do to each other. Sometimes I am the subject and sometimes I am the predicate. I don’t remember all the words for sentence structures; sometimes I’ll leave a comma where I know it’s not “supposed” to be because it sounds better; everything is about feeling for me.

*

When Mandy was alive, they told me there were ghosts in my old apartment building; she often felt them late at night when she was walking down the steps to the front door. I almost never used the front door. I entered and exited through the fire escape in the back.

It seemed like I was the only one who lived in that building. It wasn’t just that I only took the back entrance. I never heard or saw anyone. I’d have big, loud dance parties in my relatively small one-bedroom. Some of us would go on the roof I technically didn’t have access to, or smoke cigarettes on the back steps, and no one ever said anything. Maybe my only neighbors were the ghosts Mandy saw.

I think of this a lot now, how eerie it is to know Mandy would be a 36-year-old ghost just six, seven years later. How those days in that apartment and the ones after would be a ghostly presence haunting me at random.

I want ghosts to be real because that means a person still exists somewhere. Some people say that ghosts are only ghosts if they have unfinished business—that they inherently can’t be at peace. Maybe we say that because we can’t be at peace knowing there are ghosts among us.

What do we know of what ghosts feel? Ghosts are just a word for our dead. They’re something we’ve made scary. And I am scared of them, too.

*

The new woman calls me hungry, says she likes how hungry I am.

I think of high school, stuffing dinner in my underwear to later flush it down the toilet, eating cracklin’ oat bran cereal in the morning like it was good because I couldn’t get away with stuffing milk into my underwear and I was happy to have no choice but to eat. It’s because I was hungry. I was hungry for food because I was anorexic; I was anorexic because I was hungry.

The new woman says she’s writing an adaptation of a novella—without saying the name of the novella—about two women, one of them a vampire, that came out a few decades before Dracula. I say I’ve read Carmilla, the one Carmen Maria Machado edited. She says I’m the first person she’s ever met who’s also read Carmilla and she’s speechless.

When I tell my best friend Haley, they are a Capricorn about it and say Carmilla is part of the queer vampire canon. I tell them that when I was reading it, a lot of queer people I told about the book hadn’t heard of it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter when everything feels romantic and you’re both so hungry to know each other you try to learn everything about the other—and be known—really fast.

*

In a way the woman and I are vampires. The vampire and the bitten become the same beast. They merge.

*

I realize I’m wearing Mandy’s cardigan and no pants or underwear as the new woman and I fuck for the 100th time this weekend. Wearing it while fucking is not something I could have done in the first few months after they died. That’s all I would have thought about and it would have felt too strange. Now it feels exactly right—joy and pleasure and grief so intertwined they’re fucking.

How grief intertwines like this, when the new woman leaves for the weekend and I want to show her a video of Mandy reading poetry so I text it to her but when I do I listen to it too and cry. I’m thinking of sitting next to or across from Mandy and how it’ll never happen again and how it’s been almost a year that went by like nothing but waves and waves of grief and joy. How my cat is sleeping at my feet and I have a book of poetry next to me that Mandy will never get to read.

In the middle of talking about how hot we find each other, I write a text to the new woman that she and Mandy would have really liked each other, then delete it, then write it again, then delete it. I don’t want to ruin the mood, even though the new woman and I have already talked about everything. We’re hungry, and when you’re hungry, it feels like you don’t have time.

I feel my hunger transforming into something good, like something Mandy would have wanted for me.

*

I come back to write about the new woman and suddenly it feels strange to call her “the new woman.” We’re now solidly in love. I’ve been writing this—without really knowing what it was about—long enough for that to happen.

First I thought it was about hunger, then I thought it was about ghosts, then I thought it was about grief, then I thought it was about love.

In the beginning of my relationship with the woman, she said she’d never started something with someone while they were grieving. When we began dating, fall had arrived and I was already emotionally preparing for the one-year anniversary of Mandy’s death, two months early.

I look up “falling in love while grieving,” and while reading about all the ways one can say that grief is love, it clicks. I’m writing this because I’m loving the woman differently than I have others because of this grief. 

*

Grief for friends, even close ones, doesn’t get the same kind of societal attention as that for partners or family. But a 2019 study about grief for a close friend says, “Significant adverse physical and psychological well-being, poorer mental health and social functioning occur up to four years following bereavement.”

The study goes on to discuss the effects of grief on the collective, and it makes me think of another definition I found for the word “clause:” “a group of words containing a subject and predicate and functioning as a member of a complex or compound sentence.” I think of how Mandy’s friends, our writing group that Mandy was in, Mandy’s family, our local writing community—all these groups reeled from the news of Mandy’s death, all in different ways, each person acting both as an individual and on the collective.

I have been the subject and the predicate. I feel my own grief and that of others. Other griefs compound my own.

As a society, we don’t do well with grief in general. We’re supposed to go through the stages one by one, none bleeding into another. We’re supposed to be pretty much done after a year. We’re supposed to feel uncomplicatedly sad and nothing else. We’re not encouraged to understand how grief might impact our relationships or even our own bodies.

My grief is often psychosomatic. When Mandy died, I struggled to eat for eight months.

In the newest and most intense parts of grief, I am pared down.  The intense hunger isn’t there, or if it is, it’s only because my body needs food. I can eat only enough to keep me minimally functioning. The grief is in my body—it reminds me full force that I have one—but in a way I am also a ghost. In Mandy’s poem “Recipe for a ghost,” one ingredient is “Vessel of/for grief.”

*

When the woman and I had a fight once, we took a little space and then she asked if I wanted to play “Would you rather?” cards. The choices in “Would you rather?” are one shitty thing vs another; you have to decide which is less shitty for you. Perhaps because I got the cards from Mandy, playing it made me think of how this grief is the first time I don’t feel like I have a choice to suppress or not feel.

Some people become numb with grief or have difficulty accessing feelings, and that can be part of mourning too. There is no way to mourn wrong. But grieving fully, in my own way, is not the shittier option. Grief, as Mandy would often say about things that were important to her, is everything.

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