*Note on the voiceover: I got cut off by the exterminator knocking at my door midway through reading the mixtape, and didn’t have it in me to re-record ten minutes in.
🫖 Greetings, ghouls. In the (cough) *spirit* of the season, today’s essay reflects on hauntings of various sorts. Ghosting, phantoms, apparitions from the past, the like. My mixtape riffs on ghosts, ghost towns, and even ghost cowboys. Yee haw, boo hoo, etc. It’s a longer journey than usual. Enjoy! 🫖
The first time I got ghosted, I was seventeen. He was the closest thing to a high school boyfriend I ever had, and the details of our situation were deliciously cringe. I met him on the beach—our two groups merged on the sand. We were three girls, they were four boys and a girl. We repped a Westwood Catholic girl’s school while they attended a local public one in El Segundo. But, we were all scrumpy South Bay kids. Former Junior Lifeguards.
Together, our cohort would perpetrate unnecessary mild delinquencies, like jumping the Holiday Inn fence to sneak into the pool. The group dynamic was heavy on sarcasm, teasing and banter. For many undaring boys and girls, hostility is the next best stand-in for touching. I loved playing the game, and when Joe asked me out, it was one of the first times that my flirtation came to fruition.
When we started dating, I fancied us an April and Andy type couple. The Goth and the Golden Retriever. I roasted him for liking the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He drove a bottle blue vintage car that smelled like leather and exhaust. He rapped along fervently to Eminem. He was blonde and looked nothing like the rest of his family, including his fraternal twin sister. We went to the bowling alley, went to the beach. We drove around in his car. We didn’t dare go very far. We kissed now and then. Mostly kept our hands to ourselves. I took him to my junior prom (Hollywood), he took me to his (Aquarium). He went on a family trip to Ireland and we never spoke again. For all I know, he’s still in Ireland.
It was a bit confusing at the time, but in other ways made complete sense. We got the simultaneous mutual ick. I wasn’t particularly interested into foraying into the world of teenage sex (yet), and it turned out that having a boyfriend was less fun than the chase of getting a boyfriend. As soon as we were official, I felt spooked and trapped. In all likelihood, he felt the same. Who knows. Neither of us asked.
//
In the present day, not all that much has changed. Sometimes mutual ghosting is an unspoken contract. Recently, I felt wracked with guilt about letting a situation fizzle rather than ending things definitively and directly. A friend reminded me that it takes two to tango. Oh, right. He stopped texting me too. While ghosting doesn’t sit well with me, I wonder if some endings need not be named. We all have enough rejection on our punch cards. What if we just let this one slide? Wouldn’t that be a little gentler… A little easier…
//
Lately, other ghosts have been resurrecting. Bed stuy is a fucking minefield, Evana texted me. She’s not wrong. It’s a comical graveyard of former lovers. Sitting in the park, she spotted a man returning home after he spent the night at mine. During the same park excursion, she sat on a bench next to one of my brief flings who disappeared after injuring himself. Four days later, his name reappeared on my phone.
Hey what’s up I know it’s been a while
Three month interlude
ACL is reconstructed
How was your summer
It’s not the first time I’ve received a message from the Great Beyond. How’s working at the nonprofit? a person texted me an entire year after our hook-up. Are we soft ghosting or did we just fall out of touch? asked another after a month of silence. You just came into my mind. I hope you are doing well, messaged someone who I would rather never see again.
I wonder if I have been doing something to conjure these apparitions. Putting out an energy. Perhaps the issue is that I almost never block a number. Did I randomly appear in their thoughts, or were they just bored and taking the scenic route through their contact list? Am I one of ten who received a similar message? In a world lacking definitive endings, it seems that ghosts of the past can linger indefinitely.
//
Don’t ask do you believe
in ghosts
Ask have you seen
a ghost
//
I have seen a ghost. Or, at least I think I have seen a ghost. Or, maybe I think that I thought that I had seen a ghost at one point in my life. It was an apparition of a man standing in the pathway from my driveway to my front door. It was broad daylight and nothing about it felt menacing. Though, my memory of the memory is stronger than the memory itself. I suppose that’s a ghost of its own.
//
Last week, I returned to the Bay for the first time in two years. Five nights in San Francisco followed by three nights in Berkeley.
Stillness is the word that keeps returning to my mind. In San Francisco, I was stricken with the apparent emptiness of the city streets. No traffic, no people, no food, no bars. Just a gentle hum emanating from the cable car tracks.1 No movement, no future, no past.
I realize that my relationship with the city is a peculiar one. San Francisco is where I was born, though my parents relocated to Los Angeles before the Bay could leave a true impression. Growing up, San Francisco contained all the glamor of young adulthood that my parents cherished before family life. To me, it was romantic in a way it never could have been if I actually remembered a day of living there. A red bridge. A tower on a hill that could be seen from our apartment’s window (I’m told). Chinese food and Fleet Week. The steepest hills you can imagine and fog and salt air and street vendors.
Periodic visits to the city with my mom were cherished vacations to the promised land, during which I added to my collection of favorite landmarks and restaurants and ice cream shops. San Francisco, I determined from a young age, was where I would choose to spend my grown-up life.
Yet, this visit felt ghostly. I was nearly sick with stress about the event I was in town to produce, and guilty from the conflicting priorities of work, family, and friends. I felt off, which I blamed on my job, travel exhaustion, and poor sleep. Yet, the feeling continued after the show ended, my jet lag metabolized, and my sleep tank refilled.
One morning, I got breakfast with a friend who I first met in New York before he moved back to San Francisco. We realized that if my parents hadn’t moved, we might have grown up two blocks apart. Ships in the night. I wonder if this was the only way our paths were destined to cross, or if we would have met as neighbors in Presidio Heights. We drove through the city. A dream, a mirage, yet perfectly real in it’s hilly stillness. We merged onto the Bay Bridge and I didn’t look back.
//
I expected my return to Berkeley to feel haunted, but the instant I arrived, my spirits lifted. I saw stillness in a way that was touching. The city looked the same. The city felt the same. Many recognizable characters still roamed the streets—the man known for yelling “Hell Yeah!” and the one with Einsteinian hair who would jog stiffly in a salmon red T-shirt. Several friends never left, or returned after the pandemic. Over bites of our favorite pizza smothered in verdant chimichurri, they laughingly asserted: yes we’re still here. I was teased without bitterness about my self-mythologized life on the East Coast. Cami and I gazed at each other, wide-eyed with how much we’ve grown up. Still, the music of her laughter sounded the same, as the sun set familiarly over the Bay. My heart panged with an unnamable unchanging mundane truth that even though years have passed, my friends are still my friends. What we had was real, even if some of it was discrete to a certain phase of life. And, if I returned, I would be welcomed back. I’m not an outsider, never was. The changes in life are just as beautiful as the sameness. I was filled to the brim with uncanny touching comforting loving melancholy nostalgic bittersweetness.
//
With plenty of unstructured time to kill, I retraced my past lives and imagined the ghosts of my former selves living in infinite loops. While drinking a cup of battery acid coffee, I watched a former self make a beeline through Sproul, wolfing down a limp croissant, scrambling late, to a Linguistics discussion section. I took a seat at Caffe Strada to eavesdrop on a former self whimsically gossiping with Sarah, Raina, Vivi and Cynthia. I chuckled at the way we nicknamed everything to the point of incomprehensible baby talk. I watched us puppyguarding our laptops from potential theft. I walked from the basement of Barrows to Bancroft, witnessing a former self take one of her first walks with Roman. His class was in the opposite direction, he later confessed, but he would join me to steal a little extra time. I paused at the spot where I always turned left, and he always turned right, and pantomimed a farewell to the ghosts of Roman and Charlotte past. A man on a bicycle passed me by and I wondered if he noticed me talking to myself. I listened to Mitski and cried. Bury me at Strawberry Creek.
//
In the shadow of the Campanile, I sat on a small community of ants. At Souvenir Coffee, I sat in the sparse remnants of a flaky pastry. Perhaps the past is more corporeal than I previously imagined. Rather than memories floating down the same pathways, maybe we leave the past behind us like crumbs, dust, bits of detritus. It strikes me that souvenir is French for remember. It’s nice to return to a place where life might make sense. A place where I wasn’t such a poisoned snob. A place where I can sit in ants or touch grass, even if I’m allergic to it. I wonder what I have left in my wake.
//
I decided to drop by my thesis advisor’s office, even though he never responded to my coffee proposal. Unruffled, he said: I owe you an email. I asked him how the past three years have been and he said that he got tenure and diabetes. Pros and cons, I remarked. We talked about New York and San Francisco and Berkeley. He thanked me for stopping by and apologized for not responding. It’s all good, I replied truthfully. I prefer impromptu drop-ins, anyways, I lied.
That’s a very New York sensibility. That, and the Onitsuka Tigers.
//
Each time I revisited my old haunts, I noticed how the echos of the past have changed with time. There are so many things I didn’t notice the first time around. I was so prone to tunnel vision. It was so much easier for me to continue with the momentum of my life, even when it kept my world small. Still, I slowly chipped away at the vastness by pushing out into it. To Elmwood. To Rockridge. To Piedmont. To San Francisco.
For the first time since moving to New York, I heard a small but clear voice. A little hand tugging at my sleeve. I want to come back. And, this calling felt separate from my nostalgic proclivity to romanticize the past. I didn’t want Berkeley as it was. I was enticed by the idea of a new life there, a life that could be bigger now. I used to feel so faithful to the south side. I wondered what it would feel like to live on the north side, or in the hills. What it would be like to have a car and a room of my own, a new job and new hobbies.
I drove up to a high point above the fire trails with a panoramic view of the entire bigsmall world below. I felt touched to realize how much my perspective has grown. I thought, too, of all the people who lived in the Bay at the same time as me, but I never met until later. Their former selves are floating around, too, even though my former selves would have walked past them, unwittingly. And all the people, living or dead, who I may or may not meet down the line. I scratched a mosquito bite, which reminded me that I’m alive, not dead. My flesh and blood and pheromones attracted their bite. I’m just a piece of humanity living through the present. And, below, a stillness in all the invisible movement.
10.18.23 Mixtape
In the spirit of regular songs that are great for Halloween, today’s mixtape kicks off with Ghost Town by the Specials. There is truly nothing like the spooky opening notes from our special ska boys. 🎶 Bands won't play no more. Too much fighting on the dance floor. 🎶 The idea of a ghost town felt like it aligned with my haunted feelings in San Francisco. // Up next, a song by a crusty band who I clearly can’t stop recommending—No Need For Eyes by the Growlers. I like how so many of their songs touch on being haunted in a decidedly literal, gothic way that just brings everything to life. 🎶 Nothing to hide from anyone. No need to live like a ghost. 🎶 // From the twisted mind that brought you the previously-recommended Ghost Duet, I present Louie Zong’s Ghost Cowboys. His entire YouTube channel of animated ghosts singing little tunes. 🎶 ooOoo, oOOooo, ooOOoo, oOoOo. 🎶 It’s so cute it makes me emotional. // I can’t tell if it’s cringe or literally bad to add Kanye to the Insecure Tea playlist, but damn Ghost Town transports me to a particular time in my life. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of Sarah’s car with all the windows down, driving around Berkeley and screaming along: 🎶 And nothing hurts anymore I feel kind of free. We’re still the kids we used to be. 🎶 // And, last up, one of my favorite songs of all time by one of my favorite bands of all time: Ghosts by the Jam. I’ll let their lyrics speak for themselves: 🎶 How do you feel at the end of the day? Just like you walked over your own grave? So why are you frightened - can't you see that it's you. At the moment there's nothing - so there's nothing to lose. Lift up your lonely heart and walk right on through. 🎶
🫖 Thanks for everything! Feel free to like or comment to show your support. I’m trying to be better about responding to comments :) I’m just always humbled and flattered by your feedback. 🫖
Of course, this is ridiculously untrue. San Francisco is the second most densely populated large US city, right behind New York. In SF, you’ll find 18,630 people in a one-mile square. Though, you’ll find 29,300 in the same sized patch of NYC.
"My heart panged with an unnamable unchanging mundane truth that even though years have passed, my friends are still my friends. What we had was real, even if some of it was discrete to a certain phase of life. And, if I returned, I would be welcomed back. I’m not an outsider, never was. The changes in life are just as beautiful as the sameness. I was filled to the brim with uncanny touching comforting loving melancholy nostalgic bittersweetness."
Wow - beautifully wriiten - loved 'pamged' and this whole section made me cry....
I googled the Onitsuka Tigers and almost choked on my morning coffee.
"My heart panged with an unnamable unchanging mundane truth that even though years have passed, my friends are still my friends. What we had was real, even if some of it was discrete to a certain phase of life. And, if I returned, I would be welcomed back. I’m not an outsider, never was. The changes in life are just as beautiful as the sameness. I was filled to the brim with uncanny touching comforting loving melancholy nostalgic bittersweetness."
the ending was beautiful and real.. wow sf vol 2 for Charlotte coming soon..
yoooo absolute bars Charlotte ty for writing this!