Ghosts of a Good Thing
There are times where the dead come back.
In the movies, on TV...and in life. If your screenplay sucks, they come back, over-used, as nothing more than a plot device. If your life sucks, they come back, over-wrought, as something approaching a horror.
But if your touch is light, your approach is unassailable, and your wherewithal is sufficient, the Ghosts are miraculous. Miraculous and comforting at the same time.
Last night I was watching an old episode of The West Wing, the one where Mrs. Landingham died, and later, in a fantasy dialog with the President, returns just after a door under repair is thrown open during a storm. A familiar shudder ran wind-sprints up and down my spine: this always happens when the dead show up in the story. I used to think that it had something to do with Time, where it's time-crossed lovers/friends who are forced or kept apart. I realized last night it has more to do with the long-gone being restored.
Like when Sheridan shows up years later, sitting on the bench next to Delenn to watch a sunrise. Or when Dot shows up on La Grande Jatte to guide George. Even when Rick shows up and converses with Adam—and I wrote that! My own imagination produced such a shudder, as if I am catching myself in a mirror looking elsewhere before I realize that I'm actually not faster than light. As if there are rooms in my mind that remain secret, even now, to my larger self.
It's the surprise of it, perhaps, the unexpected familiarity of the already-so-familiar. In those few moments when the surprise occupies the senses, the physical seems a chimera, nothing but a set of limits we have accepted because we accept Euclid's points-lines-planes.
The moments of the surprise, where we lose our anchors, the universe also loses its moorings, goes adrift, unstuck, abstract, and Everything is possible and Nothing doesn't exist.
And I think it's those kinds of moments that happen so often with Sam. We spend the lion's share of days apart, being subject to belief in physical distance. Every time I see him in person, I have that moment where that objective reality thing fails and it's just Right. But again, it takes only a few moments to be completely familiar again with someone I'm already so familiar with. It's the leaving that sucks, the imposed separation from the familiar, the restoration of belief in physical geography.
When Sam shows up, or I show up at Sam's, it feels like those moments when something comes back alive, when it becomes palpable instead of ethereal. And when we're together, all lines are blurred. Physical contact dissolves physical barriers, and interplay of emotion and thought manifests bodily reactions. Time can be suspended with a touch, and space can be obviated with a glance.
The otherworldliness of it is akin to seeing those Ghosts, to believing the inaccessible is available and to knowing you can produce the context to make it all happen. Anyone can do it.
Reality is an abstraction, after all. And it's our abilities to generalize reality that allows us to change it to suit our own purposes.
So next time such Ghosts show up at your door, for heaven's sake, invite them in for coffee.