Ghosts

This morning started with a ghost.

A spectral flickering, caught beneath pooling reflections of the kitchen lights in the window above my desk. Outside, a blue morning crept across the sky, nothing more than a stealthy exchange, a swapping of shades of blue.

The ghost in question caught me off guard.

A breath-stealer, throat-squeezer, spine-shiver of a presence beyond. A hint at something otherworldly, whose figure pulled me out from the pages of my email inbox; overgrown like an abandoned garden. I had finally felt up to dealing with the weeds, but they would have to wait for a moment longer, whilst the spectre quartered back and forth. Although, I could no longer see it, I knew it was still there. Lingering in the lightening of the morning. Caught in the moment between darkness and dawn.

I have felt like a ghost recently. Of all the things I’ve been before, and all the things I could be. Half a self; scratching at the floorboards and tapping at the windowpane. Sounds a tad dramatic doesn’t it, but then find me a haunting that isn’t.

Since October last year, when a chest infection settled itself in my airways and wormed its way through my body, I have felt like I’ve barely been here. Tired. Worn out. Unable to focus on words on the page, actually, there haven’t been any words to focus on because putting words on a page has been too much of a task. There were moments I tried to convince myself I was mended, I walked, carried on working, but come the week before Christmas I burnt out completely and retreated inwards. No more work, no more walking. I disappeared, for a moment, into winter in the name of healing.

But I am no longer a ghost.

And neither is the thing I saw through the window this morning.

The thing trapped beyond the glass, sparking in my peripheral, was not a spectre or a phantom, or an otherworldly apparition. Despite its stark white appearance and its ability to be there one minute and vanish the next, this creature was entirely real and entirely present. Confirmed, in the way it floated over the sparsely leaved beech hedge and flew directly towards me as I peered out from the dimly lit room.

It's eyes, elderberry black, set deep in the disc of its face were focused, not on me, but on its next movements. As it past the window, whipped up on a stirring breeze, I could make out the small round shape of a field vole hung limply from its beak: a body bound for sustenance, an apparition left to haunt the hedgerows.

The barn owl was making the most of the half-light. Stocking up on small mammals in the spaces between the squalls that, over the past few days, have raged through the fields like scowling toddlers. I only caught her by chance. A flicker of a passing shadow, gentle as a guttering candle flame. Patience did the rest.

Both of us ghosts for the briefest of breathes, before returning back to the living.