ghost

Lisbon dispatch #2

I saw a ghost a couple days before I flew to Lisbon. We were crossing the street opposite to each other. I didn’t really get a good look at the apparition but I could tell who it was with a quick glance: the hair, the shoes, the general *vibe* it carried around itself. A fleeting moment. After I crossed the street I looked back but couldn’t find it among the crowd. All I could do was laugh. 

Shortly before she became a ghost, back when she was a real person I knew, she told me she was leaving to Lisbon for a month. She stopped being real shortly before flying across the Atlantic. I never heard from her again after the metamorphosis but I felt her presence when she viewed my stories and liked my tweets and posts. It felt like how a spirit establishes its residency in a haunted house, ratting a bookshelf or creaking through hallways. I tried to banish it by blocking it on everything, refusing to let it linger around my life any further. But still the presence remained, floating around every so often in subway cars and the streets of the city.

I was left wondering the potential symbolism of seeing it days before I made my own trip to Portugal. Was it a sign? An omen of something to come? Or just a random happenstance, the kind of chance encounters that can happen in New York? 

**

We’re all here in this flophouse because we’re running away from something. Ostensibly it’s because of the conference and the parties to come in the week after it. To link and build and connect and hang out with friends. But we can do all of that already in the city—that’s not a good enough reason to pack our bags and live on the other side of the ocean for a week with a ton of other people in these cramped quarters.

Everyone’s got their reasons. Messy breakups or directionless lives or situationships that are reaching their inevitable conclusion or some other incident they’re not willing to disclose. I’m here ostensibly because I ran into Christine back at some Fashion Week party in the dying days of summer and she invited me to stay in her airbnb. But really it’s to continue my semi-exodus from this city that started back in August, when I got burned out from the nonstop partying and the clout chasing and my group chat that was morphing from a hangout with my friends to the analysis of a scene I didn’t care about. 

From August to October I had been in town for 10 weeks and away for 8. I’m running away from my problems in the city just like I moved New York to run away from my problems at home. I should know better. I know that my demons can run laps around me. Wherever you go, there you are. But I still did it anyway. I told Christine I was in.

**

In Lisbon I’m following in the footsteps of my friends and family who travelled here before me.

In Lisbon I’m following in the footsteps of the kings and commoners and merchants and whores and fascists and revolutionaries and consultants and economists and drug dealers and expats and poets and writers and artists who walked these streets before me.

In Lisbon I’m following in the footsteps of a ghost who dwelled here before me.

**

Less than a week into the trip and the flophouse feels exhausted. The constant partying and the drugs and drama and overall degeneracy has worn everyone down. Some people haven’t slept since their plane touched down in LIS. 

We’re coming to the realization that we can’t do this anymore. Not just the partying every night here on this trip but in general. It’s been slowly destroying us. We want to make art and brands and movements, not gather around a coffee table until 7 am weekend after weekend.

New development in my life: I don’t like getting fucked up anymore. Some drinks at the bar, fine. A key bump or a microdose, sure. But the full-dose trips, the blackout drunken nights, railing line after line, I think I’m done with that. I’ve come to realize that my drug habits, especially the dissociative ones, come from trying to banish the troubles in my mind. Thinking one more k-hole will extinguish them for good. But they always come back. No amount of powders or psychedelics can destroy them.

I hope this sticks. I think it can. I’ve accomplished every goal in my life that I’ve set my sights on. Why not this one?

**

The ghost still remains in my head even after all this time. I manage its presence, make sure it doesn’t fully take over my feelings. Its footprint has been shrinking for a while now which has been a great sign.

Gabi tells me about the spirit school she went to in England. She says that ghosts only truly make themselves known in quiet spaces. That they can only possess you if you want them to, that you have to let willingly let them into your mind and body. That she would watch her instructors get possessed and see their faces physically change to match the long-gone bodies of the spirits now occupying them.

That tracks. Early on when the ghost was fresh I almost wanted to be haunted by it. To keep it around. To have it so that even if the person I knew was gone I could still have some remnant of them close to me.

It took a while for me to actively start casting it out when it emerged into the forefront of my thoughts. I’ve gotten better at it as time goes on. Its power over my consciousness shrinks as time goes on. One day it will fully cease to exist. I can’t think put it a date on it, but it’s closer than I think it is.

I think this new page of my life, the less degenerate one, will get rid of it. I want to face my problems head on. I want to shrink my social circle and build deeper connections with the ones who remain. I want to start dating again. I want to get a job again and do well at it. I want to work out or at the very least walk the streets of the city more. I want to abandon this ghost in Lisbon when I leave in a couple of days. I forgot to ask Gabi if the spirit school instructors taught them how to reject spirits from possessing you. That would have been a good one to ask.