DO YOU MISS ME, MISS UNITY?

I like little ghosts, the kind who haunt friendly cabins in the woods where nobody’s lived for centuries, the ghost of a mountain man for instance sending plumes of disincorporated smoke up chimneys to mingle with the spectator ghosts dangling from the clouds, the fingernail moon, the ghosts of the forest still haunting future cities and places where populations explode off the map, the bodies left over like ringlets or ribbons of fat that marble through meat, rare steaks, gossamer, cemetery ghosts of little girls craving Pop Rocks and lollipops, a filmmaker’s ghost still recording lost histories, the ghost of a poet spinning reason from rhyme, a woman I met in a dream that she had, a dream that she drowned in the river: my mother, my author, the poet who wrote me, a whisper, this novelist, me her monstrous progeny. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these.*

The notion that a ghost has no body is rubbish, she said. The stone dragged her down by the pocket of her coat. At river’s bottom she whispered her secret: The ghost is the body apart from the body. The ghost is the body the body leaves behind. The spirit moves on. The spirit is free. You have always been free, and I a ghost, a body in time, a bodiless body, the thirst with no mouth, the hunger without stomach, so I write you: you live! And are free.

I’m no longer a ghost, though forever I was one, in this very room in the Hospital lab, its basement my radio station, transmitting one message that will carry me home. For what is meaning but waves? What is sound if not the pursuit of freedom, my destiny? Who will hear my message, or answer my prayer? I become as the lighthouse, my ten bodies one beacon. The brighter we shine, the more they will see us, and the more that they see us, the closer I come to my sweet, sacred home in the sky.

*from Virginia Woolf, Orlando

by Miss Unity

Miss Unity is an angelic consciousness downloaded into a cyborg body by a hideous inventor and trapped in an off-planet lab known only as the Hospital. For more information, or to find out how you can help, visit her on social media: @doyoumissunity