At parties, when the wine flows and the laughter rises, someone inevitably turns to me and says, “Tell us a story.” And I do. But not the stories people expect.
Instead, I speak of the strange, the uncanny, the otherworldly. Ghosts. Visions. The things that stir at the edge of our reality. Sometimes I even get to finish one. But more often than not, someone — usually a friend’s wife — bursts into laughter and says, “Oh no, not those stories again! We’ve heard enough of your ghost tales.”
I understand. These stories make them uncomfortable. They’re unsettling, hard to place. But what I never say out loud is this: it is precisely through these bizarre, spectral tales that we often begin to search for ourselves. Or perhaps, it is through them that we dare to search at all.
And sometimes — just sometimes — we do find something.
You won’t get that from simple tales of polite drama, tidy romance, or mundane comedy. But those who have read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — they will understand. They know the Mariner.
The man with the long grey beard and glittering eye.
The man who once said:
“With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.”
And then, that haunting confession:
“I had done a hellish thing…”
“And it would work ’em woe…”
“For all averred, I had killed the bird…”
“That made the breeze to blow.”
Yes, I too — like that ancient mariner — feel myself standing still under a hot, copper sky, caught in a life that does not move.
Like a ship — painted, unmoving — in the middle of a painted ocean.
“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion…”
( Pic taken from open sources/ internet)