The Haunting of Ghosts: Elizabeth

Which may or may not be true...

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What can I tell you about Elizabeth? She was tall for a girl, her mid-length slightly wavy hair just on the ginger side of auburn. I would say striking - though whether that’s absolutely and unequivocally true or the embellishment of memory I can’t really judge. I have no photograph to go by.

We met during our first year at University, lived in flats in the same halls of residence; mine was on the second floor, hers the first. Our near collision - because that’s how I choose to regard it now - was encapsulated in a single evening. I have very little recognition of any events either before or after specifically relating to her. Again, another trick of memory.

A group of us had gone to the local pub. I don’t know how many, perhaps at least ten. Included in the group was a girl - an English-German major who lived in a hall of residence across town - in whom I was interested. These were new and heady days, and for me, newly liberate from home, being ‘interested’ in girls seemed like a suitable and appropriate pastime! That Saturday evening in the pub, Elizabeth - who I’d already met during some ‘flat-mingling’ thanks to one of the guys in our flat who’d already forged a personal connection in hers - suggested (or got me to suggest) that she come for coffee once we’d finished drinking. Indeed, she went as far to say that she was going to leave the pub almost immediately and then wait for me outside my flat.

Soon after, the English-German major left with her friends too, and so I made my way back to find Elizabeth waiting, as promised. She was reading while she waited.

We spent the next I-don’t-know-how-long sitting in my small room talking (sitting on my bed as there was nowhere else to sit). Although a medical student, she liked to read. I suppose we talked about books in part. At one point - and I don’t recall the trigger for this - Elizabeth briefly laid back on my bed. There was a moment - I’m sure there was a moment - when I could have kissed her. When I should have kissed her.

But I did not, and the moment passed. And then the evening passed.

I went to see her in her flat the following day, naïvely expecting to be able to resurrect the feeling from twelve hours prior, to pick up where we’d left off; I expected a second chance. But there was none, and I felt like a fool.

I still do.

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First-term Crush

Framed by toughened glass
you in silhouette above me on the stairs,
the apex of that charmless building
with its antiseptic corridors and cookie-cutter rooms
scarred with scuffs and memories.

What were you reading while you waited?
How long had you been standing there?

I recall a thick orange-spined Penguin.
Dickens perhaps. Or Bronte. Or Middlemarch.
I want to remember you cradling romance -
though if you carried such ambition to my room
I was too green and lily-livered to see it.

Did I know the book and now forget?
Or did I never know?

I remember red hair; your height, tall for a girl;
a physique some might have said was statuesque.
My Echo has you studying Medicine at Boldrewood
and I regret, even now, how I never
became an object for your dissection.

What would you have found in my heart, I wonder -
and what would I?

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