How To Become a Ghoul

A ghoul wanders forever without a home

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

I ran away from home. I got so used to running that was all I knew how to do.

I knew that I needed to leave, but once I left I didn’t know where to stay. 

I found myself living in a commune outside of Austin, above a divorced man’s garage, on the couch in a house full of punks and anarchists, in an abandoned warehouse, in a run down house full of burners called “The Dead End,” in the boss’s old apartment, in a co-worker’s living room, at work, in my car. I’ve lived in multiple apartments and over eight different rental houses. I’ve lived in Austin, Seattle, San Diego, rural Oklahoma, and then back to Austin again.

I actually liked being homeless. There was nobody to scream at me. I was working as a videogame tester at the time, and I had the money to rent out a small room, but I couldn’t be bothered anymore. Sitting in my car alone in the parking lot of the H-E-B, huddled in the backseat so nobody could see me, I felt like I could breathe for the first time in my life. I ate a peach with the windows unrolled and when I fell asleep using my jacket as a pillow, I dreamed of floating away. The skin of the earth peeled back.

What would it be like to have a home? That wasn’t even a question I asked myself. The 2008 economic crisis had just happened right when I was graduating highschool, I’d dropped out of college, and nobody my age was able to afford one. I’d convinced myself that I didn’t even want it. Why would I want something I couldn’t have? People like me didn’t get to have homes.

Sometimes I’d dream of a home in Iceland. I heard that psilocybin mushrooms grew all over Iceland. I’d tend sheep and live in a quaint little cottage full of plaid blankets, copper kettles, doilies, green wool jackets, warm boots, warm earmuffs. I’d harvest those magic mushrooms in a cute little wooden basket and then trip underneath the Aurora Borealis. I’d make a snow angel

Writers are good at coming up with lives they’ll never live, in places they’ve never seen. Sometimes they believe that if the lie is good enough they can crawl into it and hide.

In my teens and early twenties I’d spent a long time reading Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, Kerouac, and Bukowski. I read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  I didn’t know that at the time I was preparing myself to become a wanderer. I romanticized the idea of always being a stranger. I would hop trains for the rest of my life so that the sky would never become familiar. I didn’t want to look into the same pair of eyes twice. That was what made a true artist.

I was the kind of person who’d stop going to a coffee shop once the workers started to recognize me. I didn’t want to become a regular. That might mean people might become friends with me, start to miss me, ask questions about my life.

And what would I say? I dropped out of college and ran away because I think if I stayed I would have died. One of my biggest aspirations in life is to be a ghost, something beautiful that you can never touch.

I wanted the words that I wrote to be warm and full of blood, but if you tried to stick me you woudn’t find the vein.

It took years just to assemble some kind of coherent sanity. To build a life and project some semblance of normality. I had a soul that could be filled. Not just with transparent dreams of doing hallucinogenic mushrooms in countries I’d probably never visit, but family, and personality, and responsibility, and health.

You get so used to telling yourself what you don’t want, that sometimes you don’t even stop to think about what you do.

A home. Wouldn’t that be nice? A few months ago I went back to my grandparent’s house and my aunt and I marked baby Samantha’s height on the wall. Three generations of children. My dad and aunt, my brother and me, and now her. I wish I could have something like this, I thought. Something that lasts. Something that endures.

But I did. I did have it. I was looking right at it. The evidence was written on the wall. Why did I feel like it didn’t belong to me? Where was I, if I wasn’t here?

I know now that ghouls are real, and this is how they are made. With good intentions and grand designs, with romantic dreams, with cope, with illusions, with beautiful lies. They become ghouls because they were just trying to survive. Because a voice in their head screamed at them to get out, and they didn’t know how or when to stop running. And they don’t realize how far they’ve gone from anything real until they look back and try to find it again. Only then do they see they have nothing. They try to reach out and touch something and they can’t even feel it because the feeling died long ago. It pulsed at the end of a nerve and fizzled out.

But maybe all that you need to become alive again is an electric shock. A sharp jolt of reality that pierces through a broken illusion.

Here is a dream that could be more than a lie:

One day I will look back on the worst moments of my life, and I will smile, because they brought me here. My children will never have to know how much it used to hurt. They will know that they will always be welcome home, no matter how far they go. And in that way, no matter where they go, or how far, or for how long, they will always carry a home inside their heart. They will not have to become ghouls adrift, only at peace when they are hiding in parking lots or abandoned rooms , their bodies shifting away from the light.

And there will be a home to come back to. A little house with a big yard, and trees that shiver at night like they are quivering to tell you a secret. And dogs that roam at night, and stars that are bright enough to spill across the water that shivers at the top of a pitcher. A home that is more than a place. A home where the soul can go, and feel like it belongs.

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