One morning, I woke up and there were pancakes. I lived alone then, in a three-bedroom house. The few friends I still had worried it was too big for me. I had stopped using an alarm clock. I had nowhere to be. I usually found it hard to get out of bed, but the smell of pancakes (frying, not burning), pulled me out of bed and down the stairs.

I wasn’t afraid, just a little confused. Maybe I'd left a burner on after dinner last night. Maybe I’d never noticed that when the wind was just right, I could smell the neighbors' breakfast. Maybe… but no. There was nobody who would sneak in to make me breakfast. Nobody was coming back for me. Either way, I called out as I eased my achy body down the steep old stairs, “Hello? Hello?” I didn’t think anyone would answer, and nobody did.

Pancakes weren’t my go-to. I wasn’t even sure if I had the ingredients to make them. But damn, pancakes sounded good. And when I got to the kitchen, there they were, a whole stack of them, dripping with butter on a plate on the table. I was hungry and they smelled okay, so I figured, what could it hurt?

I sat down at the table and stared at the bottle of maple syrup, trying to remember when I'd bought it. Or if I'd bought it. Then I ate those pancakes. And you know what? They were really good pancakes. It was only when I was done that I even thought to look around. Sounds crazy, right? But that’s how I was living then.

In the hallway between the kitchen and the front door was a wall-mounted telephone with a small table next to it. Yes, this was back when we still had landlines. In fact, this one had a rotary dial. I’d never gotten around to replacing it. Why bother? It worked just fine. On the table by the phone was a notepad, a small one. You know, for taking messages. Writing down phone numbers and the like. There was writing on the top page, in blue ballpoint pen, it looked like. I flipped through it. Pages and pages were filled, some with single sentences in big letters, some crammed with tiny writing I could barely read. It sure looked like my handwriting, if I’d been writing fast, trying to catch a whole message, but there were words on there I didn’t even know:

Thou blue light, thou loose ends.

I am the lacuna in your narrative. I’m here to haunt you.

I hide in your kitchen cabinets.

The one up top that you never open anymore. Who knows what’s in there?

I scatter when you hit the light switch.

I dwell in nostalgia, magenta and neon, sepia and gray, but you won’t find me in any photograph in any album. I grow in the perforations on the edges of the film. I spread like mold, a puff of spores you inhale when you open the album and find all the images you thought you remembered are different, somehow.

When you open that cabinet door, it’ll creak like the closet door in your childhood bedroom, the one that was supposed to stay closed to the closet your parents swore was empty.

When you open that cabinet door, you’ll see that caterpillar tent stretched sickeningly across the tree outside your childhood bedroom window.

When you open your heart to me, I’ll rush in like a fool.

Thou? Why would I write thou instead of you? And what the fuck is a lacuna? It didn’t sound like me at all. But the blue light… that triggered something, made me sit down and read it through again, carefully. It was hypnotic. Poetic, I guess, though I don’t know anything about that. I knew which cabinet it was referring to. But there wasn’t anything special about it, was there?

I didn’t feel the need to find out, just then. Instead, I grabbed a rag and started dusting any surfaces I saw. I wiped away the thick coat of gray that covered just about everything in the house. There was so much junk in that house, you can’t even imagine. I couldn’t bring myself to throw much of it out. It was just there, always had been. But I dusted it all, even the little tchotchkes on the mantelpiece, like some strange altar. I carefully picked up each object and wiped it with my cloth: the meerschaum pipes, the candlesticks with ancient wax pooled in the bottoms, the music boxes that tinkled a bit when you moved them, the little carved wooden boxes that held each child’s baby teeth, even mine. I didn’t open them to see if the teeth were still there, if they’d lasted all those years. Dusting all that junk took almost all day. The words from the notepad got stuck in my head like a song. You know, when you’re not even sure you like it, but you can’t stop humming it?

I woke the next morning feeling more excited about life than I had in, well, years. I had to make my own breakfast, but that was fine. Something was happening. Nothing had happened in… well, a long time. At least, nothing good. Was this good, whatever it was? It was something. It was happening. I prayed it would keep happening.

A few nights later, I was sitting on the couch, just sitting, staring at the reflection of the room in the TV set without turning it on, as I often did. I heard a sound.

At first I thought it was the telephone, but it was coming from the kitchen and there wasn’t a phone in there.

Then I thought, a train whistle, coming through the open window, maybe, up the hill, though when I thought about it, the geography was all wrong.

Finally, I placed it: the tea kettle. I hadn’t used it since… maybe I had never used it myself. But I knew its whistle.

I went into the kitchen and, just as I knew it would be, the kettle was singing on a lit burner. I turned off the gas and dug through the pantry for an old box of tea bags. Made myself a cup and it was damn good, if I do say so. Even found a crusty old jar of honey to sweeten it.

The morning after that, I felt electrified. I woke up and immediately got myself off for the first time in… a long, long time. Can’t even say what I thought about, but fuck, it felt good. Better than good. Pleasure. How long had it been since I’d even thought about pleasure?

It went on like that. I weeded the flower beds, put in some new plants. I replaced light bulbs. I aired the place out. And I kept sitting down to eat pancakes I didn’t remember making, reading pages I didn’t remember writing, et cetera, et cetera.

I didn’t even consider leaving. I couldn’t wait to find more words.

Thou blue light, thou loose ends.

I’m the ghost, but you’re the one that’s haunting me.

You don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to.

You will, though.

You don’t have to open that door.

But you will.

I know you.

When you open that cabinet door, it’ll open onto Christmas morning. You know the one. You were eight, or was it nine? You know the one. You were so excited.

When you open that cabinet door, a hand will reach out, place a cool compress on your forehead, spoon out Jell-o. You’ll hear a lullaby. You were so excited. Then you got sick.

When you open your hands to me, I’ll hold them forever.

We can go through that door together.

One morning I went into the bathroom to find three hair dryers lined up across the counter. Like I said, the house had accumulated a lot of crap over the years. Who needs three hair dryers? I didn’t even need one, never used the things. I let my hair air dry, every time. Not like anyone was looking at me anyway. They were three handheld hair dryers. Each one looked like it was from a different time, maybe the thirties, the sixties, and the eighties. They all had that gun shape. The oldest one was metal. Not even sure how you powered the thing. The others had power cords that hung down off the counter. As I put them all away in the hall closet, where I found a couple more hairdryers, more recent models. I wondered if I could get any money for them. That old one might be a real antique. I should have had a proper estate sale, at some point. I barely used any of the junk in that house. But I just put them away for the time being.

The next time, it was just one hair dryer. And it was plugged in. The cord stretched across the room from the outlet by the light switch to the edge of the tub, where the green plastic eighties model balanced, its barrel pointing into a steaming, just-filled tub. I hadn’t even heard the water running.

I can’t say I didn’t think about it. Getting in the tub, I mean. That I hadn’t thought about it before. Offing myself, I mean. Since I’d been alone in the house, but maybe before. Not this way, not in these terms. But it was as if it had happened before, all of it, in this house. If not to me… Not not to me, exactly. I’d grown up there. My parents and siblings had lived there, my grandparents had lived there. I’d lived there my whole life. Raised my children there. They were all gone now.

This time, the words were all over the walls, in the hallway outside the bathroom after I carefully unplugged the hair dryer and drained the tub. And the wooden floor in the hall was covered with something, something that crunched under my slippers. At first I thought it was pebbles. I knelt down. Baby teeth. Dozens of them. All mixed up now, the boxes strewn all over the floor.

Thou blue light, thou loose ends.

When you open that cabinet door, it’ll open onto vertigo: a dazzling winter landscape, viewed from a cliff’s edge, all bare trees, dark water, and sheer drops.

When you open your mouth to me, I’ll rush in like a flock of swifts into a chimney.

When you open your eyes to me, I’ll rush in like the asphalt rushing toward your face when you fall from a hotel balcony.

When you abandon me.

When you abandon me.

I’ll explode.

I’ll take you with me.

I sat down, uncapped my pen, and began to write all the things I’d never told anyone, all my blue lights and loose ends.

The words were right. When I finally opened the cabinet door, I felt the wind on my face. The wind of high places. I leaned over. I fell into it.