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MY GHOST WIFE
By Jeffrey V. Tolentino
Even now, the memory of it still makes my blood run cold. It was a totally ordinary day when it first happened: I was taking a bath one cold December morning. I usually rinse my face with soap twice but because of the cold I decided to do it only once. When the lather finally thickened, it was a cue on myself that my pores now are well scrubbed. I turned around and let the water run down my head. Slowly and without any thought, I opened my eyes to let the water in and help clean my eyeballs as well. At first sight I thought it was only water playing tricks on my eyes for I seem to notice a liquid-like dancing figure in front of me. I closed my eyes and pulled my head away, when I opened them, that is when I shrieked:
“NYAHH!”
It was a habit that I let the bathroom door open whenever I’m inside. My siblings are quite obnoxious on some things yet there was mutual understanding between us that we are to respect and let each have the privacy that a simple bathroom has to offer. The trust remained unbroken until that day. My voice echoed so abysmally outside that my older burst inside wearing a face expression expecting no less than doomsday itself.
“What happened?” he yelled.
“There was a ghost, there was a ghost,” I said quickly.
His face turned from complete worry into pure disgust and left shaking his head without closing the door behind him.
“It was a woman,” I followed and told him as if its gender would confirm its existence, but he paid no heed. Maybe he thought it was one of those tricks that I sometimes pull on them and so, hiding my lower half behind the door, I repeated myself: “It was a woman!” He gave his verdict by splashing cold water over my face.
The experience was overwhelmingly difficult to analyze that I simply forgot about it in just a matter of days. Maybe it really was just my imagination. After all, everyone knows that the imaginations of young males are working at its peak inside bathrooms. So I continually led my life as any young, adventurous, foolish man: Unconcerned of the real world. I unknowing that soon life will present its realities; and what better way to reveal them to me than from the hands of the most unreal woman I have ever met?
She came to my room. It was already midnight but still I couldn’t sleep. It was one of those nights when my mind would go wandering uncontrollably around. I opened my eyes when I thought I heard a faint and distant voice calling my name. I alighted myself from the bed and stood upright in my dark room.
“Peter please don’t be afraid. Peter, please,” I was not mistaken. There was someone else in the room! I turned on the lights and let my eyes wander about. There was no one else inside but me. I poked my ears like they were broken radios that needed fixing.
“Peter please don’t be afraid. I’ll show myself now,” again the voice, and it sounded almost like it was pleading. “And please don’t shout!” this time it sounded more like a command.
Slowly, she materialized.
“Oh My God.” What I saw shook my entire world. I cowered like a little boy back to my bed and hid under the blankets.
“Oh Peter stop this nonsense,” I heard her say.
I found myself uttering this word: “Mama.”
“Oh Peter.”
“Please go away. I promise I’ll be good,” I begged her. My bed voluntarily shrinks and I felt her presence beside me.
“It’s me!” she announced.
“Me who?”
“Me!” she said emphatically, “your wife!”
“But I’m only sixteen,” I reasoned like a child.
“Of course I know that. We’re not married yet,” her voice sounded so casual and frighteningly sweet that my fears skyrocket.
“Please go away,” I begged her again. For a little more than a moment the room fell quiet. Trembling, I moved the covers away and peeked outside. She was already gone.
The experience turned my whole being into a complete stupor. I started locking myself in my room on daylight and never went inside when night came. I dramatically lost weight and never spoken a coherent sentence for months. I also stopped attending school. Naturally, my supportive and loving parents felt genuine concern about my health that they practically, without any hint of reservations, did everything in their powers to find me a cure.
“He’s being haunted,” the witch doctor said.
My parents tried their very hard to feign surprise—after all it’s what they always say—but they pathetically failed. The witch doctor, a wiry old man with tousled long hair, noted my parents’ reaction and his face fell. In an effort to cheer the crestfallen witch doctor my mother asked him:
“Is there something we can do to…” she tried to find the word, “…unhaunt him?”
“Exorcise,” my father corrected my mother. The witch doctor’s face brightened.
“There is no way we can do that. I have strong powers but even I have limitations. The spirit that has inflicted pain in your beloved son is very powerful.” It was my parents’ turn to be crestfallen. “But you can make an offering!” the witch doctor then announced.
I thus successfully convinced myself that what cured me was one, plump fried chicken that my parents offered to one, old and dying acacia tree fifteen feet behind our house; which, in the case of the fried chicken, my three siblings voraciously ate after no more than a minute my parents left. (And they also reasoned when my mother asked them what had happened to their offering was that, maybe, the spirit ate it.) When in the truest sense, it was her absence that did it.
I continued my years carrying with me her memory: that remarkable encounter with an eccentric ghost who calls herself my wife. On some nights when sleeping is too hard, I would find myself looking around in my dark room, and for a moment I thought I would see a face. A face that I remember so distinctly but there was none, not even a shadow, and I would smile at myself when memory recounts to me how I had reacted years ago.
If I had told this to anyone back then I would have been branded insane all my life, for there are moments when it seems someone was silently guiding my life. I vividly remember once like it was just yesterday when during a class exam I was tempted to peek at my classmate’s papers. Just when I was about to my own papers flew out of my desk and so prevent me from cheating.
I knew it was her. It is crazy, I know. Even now, it is really hard to consider her existence. But one night, I braced myself and mustered all my courage and energy to speak these words, these words that changed my life for the better:
“I know you’re there. Please come.”
It was magic. No other words can describe it. She first appeared like a faint reflection of herself on a river, then gently turned into a solid and tangible beautiful woman. She had long black hair that runs down to her hips. Her eyes are like shimmering crystals ornamented with brown wood as iris. Her pink lips are perfectly carved and her skin’s as smooth as the finest sky.
“Wow,” I said in disbelief.
She smiled and slapped me on my side, then exclaimed, “Finally, you have come to your senses!”
“You’re real,” I said when the touch of her hand registered in my head.
“Of course I am,” she announced proudly.
I spent hours attentively listening to her as she tells me stories about her life (past life) like she was a distant relative. Then I asked her when the thought hit me:
“What did you mean when you said we are married?”
“We aren’t married yet, of course…” she started congenially and moved on from when she died. She told me that when she was in heaven she met God and asked Him if He made her a partner. “Like an Adam,” she said. God answered her yes, and she asked Him who it was. God gave her a name: Peter. She then asked where Peter is.
“He’s not dead yet,” God replied.
Thus, her reason for being here.
“And you’re quite certain I’m your Peter?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she answered in her usual upbeat manner.
“There are millions of Peter—“
“Would you rather have me
mistaken?” she interjected. I did not give her an answer for a thought occurred
to me: Jesus, she’s as deluded as I am!
I guess in our lives we are all given a good number of years when happiness is felt most. I spent those years with her. A lot of you would probably think that I am insane. Maybe I am but it does not matter in the least. I was happy! In fact my family thought I was crazy all my life. I can clearly remember those days when they would wonder why I go to museums and movie theaters alone. Or why my sudden interest in soap operas? Or why I never danced with any woman, or even received a single phone call from one? I could have given them answers, true answers, but why make them delusional too?
Now, on ending my story, I cannot give you a happy ending as much as I would like to myself because then it would be a lie. Our story, my ghost wife and I, was not a happy ending; but it was not a sad one either. It’s one of those dead ends that even a perfectly concocted equation to a given situation would produce a dubious answer. But I dare not bore you with a paradox. I am not an authority on such things. Instead I will give you the truth.
It happened on my twenty-fifth birthday, the last that I saw her. I spent the night out with my wife and a few of my friends. It was an altogether happy occasion, but as it was about to end a lady friend of mine stole me from the rest and dragged me to a secluded spot. Mind you, she is a chaste woman. I have known her for years. With my invisible wife beside me she confessed almost in tears that she has loved me all these years. And she kissed me. At an early age I learned to doubt any such declarations. How can one be certain of such a profound feeling towards a man she has yet to live with?
When we were finally alone, my ghost wife and I, I was about to tell her these words that seems to last eternally as there will always be lovers: It does not mean anything. But even before I could speak she kissed me in a most gentle manner. Then she whispered in my ear: “Have the grandest life. I will wait for you.” And she was gone.