MIKE DRESSEL

Apparition

I didn’t anticipate missing you as intensely as I did, as totally, so I conjured your ghost to accompany me, a companion to the quotidian rhythms of this foreign place: The Friday afternoons drinking at a cafe undisturbed, scanning the headlines of newspapers printed in a language I (still) barely comprehend, nurturing a steady buzz; or to the expat pub where I skulk when I’m lonely for my mother tongue, playing “Because the Night” and “Suspicious Minds” on the jukebox, and once Automatic for the People in its entirety.

A simple summoning spell—a swatch of your favorite t-shirt, a postcard written in your looping print, a spritz of your signature cologne—to have you near me on the Straßenbahn as it purrs a loop around the city, to fondle marble-sized grapes at the farmers market in the square, where old women with fine silver hair importune lazy shoppers in their country dialect to buy their marmalade, homemade schnapps, fresh-pressed juices in bottles with hand-scrawled labels.

I came to lecture to bored Uni students, to work, to leave the sum of the past an ocean behind, but I passed through customs carrying loss of the sort that can’t be declared, hence this spell to lure something familiar to this foreign locale. What’s the name for a man who prefers to be haunted?

Still, I cannot bind you to me fast, you appear only to vanish again, intemperate. A fair-weather apparition, as fickle in death as you were in life. Never able to commit fully, ungraspable as the fog that seeps in on pre-dawn strolls. I’ll turn to talk about upcoming plans only to find myself alone once more, leaning on my rickety balcony at sunset while the sky over the mountain range colors like a bruise, my mutterings underscored by the neighbor’s rhythmic punishing of a dusty rug against the railing and the soft grunts of the teenager below doing pull ups on the fire escape. Then I’ll sense you hovering near while I stub out a cigarette, as the eastbound train arrives on the platform, or while I’m pacing the sloping, lamp-lit brick alleyways searching for sex—the picturesque, old world passages a backdrop for my imperative, corporeal desires, wanting the familiarity of a stranger’s hands.

I’ll accept our arrangement, then, for the duration, traveling with an atlas of regret.

Mike Dressel is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in Nude Bruce Review, Warm Brothers, Bachelors, Newfound, Your Impossible Voice, Chelsea Station, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others.