This is not a ghost story but a ghoststory.

I had been working in the archives for a couple of months and the photos were getting easier to distinguish from one another. My supervisor used to describe how to identify them temporally. I loved that she used that word so casually. I learned it from her and it was tagged with her librarian regality and high foreheadedness whenever it passed from my lips. It felt like an offering or an homage, like she was now the patron saint of temporally. 

 I had taken to evening shifts pretty quickly. I liked to sleep during daylight hours. Afternoons bored my senseless; the sun lent everything a shimmering sort of lassitude. Evening felt right for the work too. There were ghosts about then, storied things that shift bellow celluloid or incubate in darkrooms’ red light. My favorite photos were the ones with dour, distant faces. I appreciated a vacant stare. Sometimes, in a lull, I’d catch myself mirrored, staring, staring. Those pictures are the most embodied history, self-explained. If nostalgia can be inherent to a person or an object it exists interstitially between my outlying stare and the photo’s, time laden one. 

I met my ghost on a Sunday afternoon. Light cut into my motel room, landed on objects and pooled in unusual corners. I imagine that my ghost liked it there in those honeyed pockets. The warm glow and the cold glow like poles on a magnet, like how the moon steels a bit of the sun’s warmth to light its way. 

I had arrived the night before, slunk through the motel’s external hallways, as all who enter motels at night do. (You have to slink and steal in motels at night, strolling is for daylight hours). In daylight, I noticed my ghost. The moment I sighted them I felt ghostplaces settle against my skin. I thought of the archives back home, small town histories and all those little scandals working underneath. They pictured like an inverted person making only aborted gestures and standing just to the left of where you expect them to be. 

We didn’t speak, just locked eyes for a time. Our meeting was too tenuous for talking, like my ghost would startle or I would. So I went about my business and my ghost followed. Walking through an unfamiliar city, I wasn’t sure if my ghost was an echo of myself or if I echoed them. But I only really considered this in moments when my eyes drifted just left of where I meant to leave them.

My room emptied into the parking lot and I skirted the edges on my way out. The archives weren’t far and winter’d thawed to spring so I had decided to walk. I liked the soft shoots and the earthy smell of early morning, like meat and minerals. 

When I arrived at the city’s archives I was struck by the newness of it. Not shiny newness but the weighty kind, which hints at things and makes you feel shallow next to it’s depth. There were unfamiliar histories about, hidden in the stacks and carved into aging desks. I had to descend four stories into the ground to reach the place and imagined the stairs carving past silt and peat and chalk beds as I made my way. There I achieved a breathlessness, in the dark wooded cavern. It tasted like cold and paper, like my grandparents’ basement after rain. 

I set up in an empty corner, spread out my papers and files into an academic topography and began the arduous task of temporal identification. Cars and coats and scrawled captions coalesced into hard numbers, things that could sit solidly on legal pads and in file cabinets. The stillness was integral, the emptiness of high ceilinged, windowless spaces paramount. Task at hand, time abounded. 

At midday I bought cheap coffee from a kiosk in a rundown mall nearby. Both were on their last leg, all the colors washed out of the thin liquid and the carnival colored benches. It felt like a shadowbox place, all shallow layers and illusory. I sipped at the coffee on my way back and I saw my ghost swallow too, like reflex or thirst. Retreading those steps down, down, down, I felt the building creak pleasingly. The morning rush of four or five graduate students had tapered off to me and my cold coffee. Pencils sharpened and pages turned I dug in for the rest of the afternoon. 

That night I couldn’t sleep. Working days did not agree with me and I kept remembering my ghost, my sad friend. They had observed each thing carefully. They considered and head tilted. Occasionally, paper thin fingers would brush at people as they passed, wonderingly. Their eyes would follow others too long. I wanted to ask if they had recognized someone, but it seemed unlikely. These were not ghost people like them, too solid, too warm. When the sun set they had melted down into the bed next to me, deflated for spatial convenience and sunk, sunk, sunk. I hadn’t noticed until then but they were breathing, deeply in shallow spaces, arrhythmic and sincere. I thought of the forest in fall back home, when the leaves flee the trees and settle bellow your feet. I thought of how when you walk there is so little sound, just the crunch of dead things. 

I woke up to the taste of tin. I used to get nosebleeds as a kid when the air thinned out, but when I checked in the bathroom mirror there was no red, just a line like a bruise down one side of my face, like some liquid had caught as it slid down and stained. I checked the ghost too and came away confused. There was no mark there, no line of bruise color. My ghost, would rub up under their left eye and I could feel my face twitch and flinch. I decided to go for a walk then and settle the disquiet that pricked up the back of my neck and sat heavily in my stomach. It tasted like tin too. My ghost followed. 

It was early morning in the park. My pace was brisk to match the cold and I’d feel myself misstep when someone else’s breath caught in the back of my throat. I must have looked pretty suspect in all the grey and green. When I ran out of green and dead leaves, I picked through the high-rises and townhouses. I passed three men walking dissimilar dogs and found myself circling back unintentionally. Around and around, until it seemed like the same seven structures made up all of the 20,000 city blocks. I became thoroughly lost and in an attempt to retrace my steps I circled inward. 

I tripped past the fourth coffee shop in as many circles and felt a jolt run up my spine from somewhere in my guts, another yank that carried over into dissonance. I looked around for my ghost. They were gone and I was suddenly distraught. I hadn’t known I could miss the thing so well. I remembered the night before waking at some point and feeling paper against my palm, a reflection and a perturbation. It had felt the same. 

I sunk further into the city. Circling. Faster and faster until there were five dogwalkers and seventeencoffeeshops all with the same tired eyes and red doorways. The lampposts exchanged and the light wavered at the edges of things until all the roads were cobbled and the buildings cast shorter shadows and the light cut and landed and pooled in unusual corners. I couldn’t find my ghost but then I saw the green again and they blinked out at me from behind a tree. The green reached out and I had never felt closer to ease. 

When the sun had sunk some way further in the sky, I returned to work. My ghost tread silently after me. Friends again. I felt more even keeled than I had that morning. 

Returning to my subterranean place of work I noticed paintings and dioramas in odd corners of the place that I hadn’t the day before. The paintings were mostly forest scenes, all browns and blues, quiet reminders of cold and decay. The only things moving in them were people and occasionally a hound or two, shadowy and suspect. There were suggestions of frivolity: a hat in hand, a stick to throw, smoke curling upwards from a pipe. I estimated they sat somewhere circa 1735. I checked the plaque next to the one by the door and was dismayed to learn I was off by around seven years. The dioramas were all of taxidermy aquatic birds. Their glass eyed gazes were striking. I couldn’t figure how the taxidermist had managed to ingrain such supremacy in their specimens. When I looked at them straight on those black marbles pushed past me, refused to engage. But as I made my way through the stacks, returning to my back corner home, I felt them trained on me, the interstitial spaces pressing in and edging me out. 

I did my job a second day, the last day of two in the city. I worked through the night. I found only half the things I’d hoped to and layered them in a dissatisfyingly thin folder labeled according to date and location. By the time I gathered all my material goods and shuffled towards the backlit stairwell, light had started to prick at the horizon outside. I left the place, disturbed and undisturbed.

Back at the motel, I shifted my things from sterile motel places into my suitcase. It felt cinematic, all effortless folds and haphazard office supplies. I even had an audience of one sat next to the suitcase. I left the motel when the light was further along, leaking honey color across the ground. I strolled the length of asphalt that took me to my car. Clicked and thudded and rumbled my way in and out of the parking lot. 

The road was long and winding and lined with forested land. My aged Toyota was a blip of green in a hesitant sprawl of earthlier green. I was alone on the road so early in the day and became so accustomed to the steady drive that I hardly noticed the town spring up around me. It started with car dealerships and movie theaters and filled in with fast food and residences as I went. 

It was around noon by the time I parked in my archive’s lot. I had to dig for my keys at the bottom of my bag for a minute before I found them and then struggled to push the right one into the lock at the back of the building. 

Everything felt a little too heavy, sleep laden. It was like a pushback against the taste of tin and paperflesh feelings; things leaned instead of syncopated. I navigated down a flight of stairs and past a couple shelving units to the records buried deep in the back. Those four or five file cabinets were so rarely accessed that they lived past the reach of the florescent light strips. I picked lazily towards the Cs and settle my new packet somewhere there. 

On my way out, I realized I hadn’t seen my ghost in hours. I wondered if they had slipped in with the Xeroxed photos and dates collected the prior night, if new ghostplaces were settling in alongside the old. Or maybe I hadn’t been looking left, just straight on at things. Either way, I figured it could hold a night, or afternoon, whatever time it took to sleep and feel awake again. So I left the archives in my blip of green. Outside the light was shifting colder and it felt something like ease.