Talking To Ghosts

Five Year Anniversary

I was anxious all last week. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan have been gone for over three weeks. Update: I was anxious all last year. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan have been gone for over fifty weeks. Update: I have been anxious for over three years, over four years, over five years. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan are gone.

I will never see you again. Even your mother thinks that you are dead. The Village Voice printed the same photograph of you and your beau that they ran eight months ago. I’m saving both of them.

Just seeing your face anywhere besides on that Missing Persons flyer on the lamppost on Ave. A would make me feel better. If I only I had the chance.

I see you on the street and I can’t believe that you’re alive. Then you turn around and you are someone else, ignoring me as I am gasping.

I see you in the night sky, reborn as a shooting star, crossing the Milky Way to Sagittarius, onward to celestial baptisms in the afterlife that you didn’t believe in.

Three and a half years after your disappearance, divers searched the Hudson River for you, unbeknownst to me, as I found you when I accidentally broke pottery that you gave me, your spirit embodied in shattered ceramic, restless with the understanding that all of the love in the world could not save you.

And all of the tears in the world will not bring you back. But I still love you. I still cry for you.

I cried your name a hundred times into the unfolded laundry on my bed. It’s been over five years since you disappeared, and almost five weeks since I had clean clothes.

My wardrobe has been washed, but you’re still dead—never coming back from the laundromat, the dry cleaners—wherever you went last, not knowing it as your final memory of this world.

If you do return, I still won’t be dressed to meet you, because the tears will not have dried by then.

But we still cry for you. We still love you.

 

Camden’s mother, Laurie Sylvia, in front of 76 Pearl Street, November 18, 1997.