I saw a ghost on the Queen Mary.

It was a beautiful wedding; Harry Potter themed with magic wands and fantastic beasts. We danced new life on that old boat with old friends in new shoes.

The Queen Mary is the perfect metaphor for marriage, really. A lot of marriage is old and too protected by culture and tradition to be retrofitted, even when it's falling apart. There are strange juxtapositions of rotting deck work right beneath shining sconces, mildewed corridors on the way to a bottomless mimosa. The old brass elevators on board quit working, but the old stuff can't always be fixed. So the ship has a new elevator tower built beside it. We adapt. The haunted pool is empty of water, but a projector makes wavy blue lines on the tiled ceiling so that guests can pretend. 

Marriage is no less a haunted house. It is quite something to stand up for friends and declare that you'll support them in the endeavor of staying together, of honoring and cherishing one another, when you know that in two years' time they might not recognize their partner or themselves anymore. Life does that to all of us, and yet we still pretend we know what the future will bring. We raise our glasses to it. We watch our step the whole time, trying to remember not to trip on the bulkhead or get splinters from the weathered railings while in our fanciest dress. 

All of August was like those few days on the ship, really. Unexpected combinations of great and terrible, stuck in the dock for all eternity and yet also making vast, unexpected starboard turns way out to sea. Think I'm being vague? I am. Summers have never been kind to me. It is always the season of haunting. 

Every ghost you see is the same ghost. 

Everyone knows the Queen Mary is haunted. Even if it's just something worked up for the tourists to get them to prowl the poorly-lit halls, there's an instant creep factor to being on board. We, the wedding guests, drunk under the Long Beach stars, couldn't resist swaying arm in arm to "My Heart Will Go On," because every ship is a shipwreck. Every luxury liner carries the Titanic in her heart. And everyone in our age group saw that film as an impressionable teen. So is the boat haunted, or are we?

Every ghost you see is you. 

Someone asked me recently if I believe in ghosts, and my answer was sheepish and then scientifically backpedaled. Yes and, no but. I believe there are facets of energy that we don't fully understand, but I don't think it lives in the upholstery like bedbugs. I believe it lives in us. If a ghost wails in a cruise cabin and no passenger on board hears, does it make a sound? Probably not. Probably haunting, like all human art forms, needs an audience to have meaning. 

So the shadow I saw behind the locked glass-and-brass doors on that old ship was probaby my own reflection as I strained through transparent layers to see the past and force it to tell my future. When you sit through new vows with your lucky partner of thirteen years, and the two of you hold hands in that secret way that makes your rings clink together like a private toast, you are haunting. You are haunting each other, you are haunting your future selves. Your past selves stretch out behind you, ghostly as kite-tails, as inescapable as bad yearbook pictures. They weren't all invited to the wedding, but they came anyway. They always do. People go home later with the warmth of it in their bellies like wine, but swearing they walked through a cold patch and heard a voice from nowhere. It was all true. We are all getting married and ghosting each other, and we have the changing tides beneath us to prove it. 

This summer, my ghost is a future self rather than a past one. I am waiting on word, on changes, on so many things. I love writing you these letters when I have news and new work to share. But this time, I'm coming and going like a ghost. You'll have nothing to show for this encounter except the way it made you feel. 

Did you shiver, just now? They say that's something walking over your grave. But maybe it's just you, chasing past the place where you'll be buried, trying to predict what the future will bring. 

Boo. 

Meg