Jasmine Flowers, Ghosts, and Vanilla Ice Cream
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 27: "If you want to start believing in ghosts, stop sleeping at night and write a book about dead people."
I went out for dinner at the Café de la Mairie on Place Saint-Sulpice, and watched the last of the bright blue evening sky deepen into navy behind the gold-splashed facade of the church. Through the browning leaves of the chestnut trees in the square, the front of the mairie was flooded with light that was brilliant red, and cool lilac, and two shades of cerulean.
An older man in a starched white chalwar kameez and taqiyah came around to the tables on the terrace selling bracelets made with real jasmine flowers. The flowers were fat, and milky, and highly fragrant. I bought one. They reminded me of the white flower bracelets sold on the streets in Pakistan when I was there, and I wanted to remember. I ate a vegetarian croque monsieur and then ordered a small scoop of vanilla Berthillon ice cream. The sky turned from blue to black. Back home, I hung the jasmine bracelet from the lamp near the bed.
If you want to start believing in ghosts, stop sleeping at night and write a book about dead people. Find the graves of people with big personalities who have been forgotten by history, leave flowers on those graves, and then stop sleeping at night. See what happens.
I’m speaking poetically, of course. I don’t really believe in ghosts, which is why I wish they’d be more discreet sometimes. These ghosts who live with me, playing cards all night while I sleep, and sometimes waking me, not to join them, no, never that, but to get back to work, writing their story, for I am their employee.
The night invades the morning, bleeding its pink neon all over the pavement. The jasmine flowers, still hanging from the lamp, and the narcissus and tulip and hyacinth bulbs I bought in a brown paper bag on the table. I had planned to go and plant them in the cemetery, under an apple tree and a miraculous daisy bush, which grew from a bouquet I left on a small grave there.
Sometimes grief is like a water balloon. You carry it around all the time, shift it from hand to hand, and sometimes you drop it, and sometimes it breaks. Always this awkward, breakable, explodable thing, which you have to juggle. You get good at it, so you almost forget it’s there, but then—oops! Splat. There goes another one. You can never put it down. Can you feel it, the water balloon, in your hand even now?
I, mother to a sapling and secretary to ghosts. As a rational person one can’t believe in such things, but sometimes, the world of experience is so much bigger than that.
Adapted from several notebook entries written in 2022.
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