Ghosting Read Online Free

contentment perhaps, but even that is quite rare. As for unhappiness, well, that is quite hard to sustain through all the new dawns and fresh hopes. Besides, you can get over most wounds inflicted in the early years. Even if they remain as little pinpricks on the surface of your skin, they serve the purpose of “placing” you in the world, giving you an argument with it. Psychologists have told us that bad things are passed down the line—cruelty, ignorance, secrets and lies. The persecuted become persecutors, the abused become abusers. Yes, but the chain can always be broken, provided the last link wants it enough.
    All narratives are suspect, unreliable. The stories we tell to make sense of our lives are essentially made up. We tell these stories to protect ourselves from the existential nightmare scenario—the idea that our lives have no pattern, are going nowhere. We grapplewith the notion that ordinary life is absurd, contingent, accidental, full of chance. The concept of randomness is hard to bear, so the mind scampers around to impose a structure on random bits of experience. A humming-bird takes to the air and the tide of human history is altered.
    To understand the world is a basic human longing, powerful and urgent. The idea that there is rarely any point to anything is not to be borne. So the child in this story looked back and tried to understand. Here is some of what was understood: that not everything in the literal world can be made sense of, that you sometimes have to leave it behind and enter the poetic world where making sense is optional; that things are often not what they seem; that language is precarious, that sometimes there is not a name for what you feel; that you take love where you find it; that even when everything is concealed you can end up being open to the world.

    In the small Fife town where I grew up, no one went abroad much. The minister at our church, the Reverend Musk, claimed to have a son called Chad who was a missionary in Africa. Africa was about as abroad as it was possible to be. Each Sunday, after a sermon about God's mercy and just damnation, we prayed for Chad, insincerely in my case. We had never met Chad Musk, never even seen photographs of him, and with a name like that it was impossible to believe in his existence. The Scots are famed for being explorers, but the pioneering instinct seemed to have passed us by. Mining was the thing in our town. Underground, not overground.
    Travel, insofar as anyone did it, seemed to narrow the mind further. The place looked in on itself, suspicious of anyone or anythingthat didn't belong. The town's only famous daughter was Jennie Lee and, in our household at any rate, she too was regarded with mistrust. Too radical, too fervent, too much an iconoclast. And to make matters worse she had gone to England and married a Welshman, a fellow socialist who had had the gall to oppose Churchill during the war. “It just goes to show,” said my mother, as she so often did, but quite what it went to show or how or why was never made clear.
    Being a child is a job like any other. Some children are good at it, others never quite master it. You understand quite early on that the job consists mainly in trying to please adults, but though I tried to please adults quite a lot, they hardly ever seemed pleased with me. As a child I was vaguely aware of disappointing my parents without ever intending to or understanding quite how it happened. The atmosphere at home was thick with ill-defined threats and admonishments.
You'll get what's coming to you, you're in for your just deserts, you won't know what's hit you.
What on earth did it all mean?
Just deserts
were unfathomable; on the other hand wasn't it obvious that I would get something if it was indeed coming my way, and why would I not
know
what had hit me? It was all very mysterious. Sometimes my father threatened to knock someone
into the middle of next week,
which, despite not being able to imagine