Chapter 3. Ray and Lolo
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Ghosts do not have sex. When they make love, it is not a physical thing so much as lying together and making love, you know, like joining your passions into a long rushing stream of very deep love and joy together. Like you come up for air, gasping, still holding each other, and back into the swirling, tumbling water together. So in that way, love making of ghosts is longer and more satisfying. And ghosts can fall in love, which is deeper and more satisfying than among the living. And I'll tell you, knowing or sensing that you are going to lose that person makes it all the more intoxicating and yet terrifying. Lolo was very picky and loyal. She loved one young man in her life, Henri, and now it looked like she would love one man in the spirit world.
There came the day when our friendship passed a certain boundary.
Until then, we seemed to just enjoy spending time together. Sometimes we walked the streets of Montreal, where she grew up. Sometimes we walked the streets of San Diego, where I lived most of my life. It was wonderful to hold hands and sail through the air in great stores and malls, savoring the scents of shopping, which she loved. We would fly together, inhaling the scents of fine perfumes, colognes, leather purses, expensive clothing. She loved to look at the shiny merchandise. I just enjoyed how it all worked. The clerks were like anchors, like priests and priestesses of the temples of commerce and allure. What a great engine this whole thing was.
Other times, we walked through Balboa Park and savored wind rustling softly in the great lemon gum eucalyptus trees in the canyons, the rustle of ancient willow trees on grassy hilltops, the whisper of wind in 125-year-old Canary Island date palms tall as six story buildingsand then the Moreton Bay fig tree, on whose 42-foot-around trunk rises a crown eighty feet high, that spreads 145 feet in all directions.
Or we fly to the promontory of Cabrillo Point, where we can look down on the city and the surrounding mountains to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west, from an altitude of over 400 feet, and south into Mexico. One time, we saw pods of gray whales migrating south for the winter. They were majestic as they slowly rose, blew vapor, and sank again, raising a fluke, and then disappeared beneath the waves.
Or we go from Balboa Park into the zoo next door, and pet the lions, ride on the giraffes, play with the penguins, sit next to the crocodiles, or just run with the happily screaming little children who come to see the animals.
We hold hands and run through the desert floor, imagining how it was a hundred million years ago, when this was all underwater, in a shallow ocean. Giant sea creatures swam around the islands that are today just hills with big sandstone rocks on them.
We stand atop the mountains, maybe Palomar, more than a mile up, where the great dome still looks far into the night sky and sees galaxies so far away that even a ghost from earth could not reach them in a ghostly lifetime, which can be extremely long (depends on how soon your mission comes up and your fated destiny comes due).
One warm summer night, we went strolling, arm in arm, through the Gaslamp Quarter downtown. It was exhilarating because, with so many people packed around us, we were almost fully alive ourselves. Ghosts have very little perception of their own, but can absorb the senses of living people around them.
We were hungry and I craved a beer. I saw Lolo, standing on tiptoe, looking over a railing beyond which people were dining in the sidewalk area of one of the many restaurants. I saw her eyeballing a sizzling steak that smelled divine. Ghosts don't really eat, though we can smell and savor. She made that goofy, clownish face she was so good at, and looked at me as if to say, "Tear me away from here."
That night, fully dressed, we lay together quietly in the bedroom beyond her coffee shop. "Baise moi," she whispered, "Kiss me." Even before I could figure out what she meant, she pulled me close. "'Old me." She whispered wetly into my ear: "My Ray." I put one arm around her, and she snuggled close while I put my other arm over her with my hand on that shoulder. I crawled closer, so that I half-lay on top of her, and lowered my mouth onto hers. Her tongue was waiting for mine, and I sank into her love the way I would dive into a warm sea. Her love rose up all around me and filled me with warmth. I could hear her groan as the heat of my love and passion foamed and seethed in her like an ocean at high tide, breaking among the rocks, blinded by rays of sunlight, thundering on all the senses like a vast waterfall. We were two birds, circling each other in a blue sky. We were two gazelles, running side by side in high grass, for the sheer joy of running. We were gray whales, glories of the sea, cruising in slow majesty, up and down, and spouting ardent blowings.
When you are ghosts, you can make almost physical love, like humans. You lie in each other's arms, and your souls couple with an intensity that leaves you drunk and unconscious together.
I was living in a small spirit apartment near Laurel Street at that time, but after this, I practically moved in with her.
When you are ghosts in love, you can also merge together. It's your souls holding hands. You almost become a single being, thinking together, laughing or crying as one.
And then, like everything else…even stars and galaxies come to an end.
We could not stay in that limerent state all the time, of course. Like a human couple, after the first heady few months, we each resumed our normal lives. We started doing mundane things again, even haunting the places where we had died. I visited my old home once or twice, but felt distant from the betrayals of Marcus and Tamsin. There was still a stab of hurt, and there always would be, but you knowI think what Lolo and I did, during our passionate days of craze, was therapy for all that we lost. We had lost our lives, our loves, and I even more through betrayal. That's why Lolo and I came together, she the Grand Canyon, I the great blue sky that lies in it.
Like humans, ghosts who fall into passion soon either drift apart, or form a deeper love based on companionship, affection, attraction, and common interests. As with humans, it is healthy to spend some time apart and pursue some diverging interests. So Lolo began to visit art galleries, and took up painting. She would listen in on lectures at great universities, and started painting some very nice art that we put up for sale in galleries on the spirit side. You just do things like this for the sheer joy of them, not to build a career or get money or impress someone. We do get lonely, and sometimes very sad, because tragedy has put us where we are, so painting or writing poems or blowing the trumpet are great ways to expel the blues. For my part, I like to sit with my sketchpad, and doodle. I draw in a kind of scrollwork that looks like wrought iron, and then I put small poems, aphorisms, epigrams in there. I frame those writings some more, and draw and brick circles around the edges.
Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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