We have got to talk about the kids in all those Goosebumps books, for example, if your family vacation is to an amusement park called
Horror Land and your station wagon
explodes in the parking lot upon arrival, maybe shrugging it off, buying an extra large popcorn and heading directly to the
"Deadly Doom" slide is not your best
possible course of action or
if you steal a weird camera from your creepy neighbours basement and all the pictures you take show bad things happening, like,
decapitation and also tofurkey, and then all the bad things from all the pictures start happening.
Stop taking pictures!
Or if you move into your new house, and there's a bunch of small children already living in your bedroom that your parents cannot see,
Maybe don't just grab a juice box and go to play in the cemetery that is in your backyard
Or, when I tell you about the ghosts that live inside my body,
And I tell you I have a cemetery in my backyard and in my front yard and in my bedroom,
When I tell you that trauma is a steep slide you cannot see the bottom of,
That my anxiety is a camera that shows everyone I love as bones, when I tell you - when I tell you that panic is a stubborn
Phantom, that she will grab on to me and not let go for months,
This is the part of the story when everyone is telling you to run,
To love me is to love a haunted house
It's fun to visit once a year, but no one wants to live there, and when you say "Tell me about the bad days",
It sounds like all the neighbourhood kids daring each other to ring the doorbell
And you love me, like the family walking through Horror Land holding hands,
You are not stupid or careless or even brave. You've just never seen the close up of a haunting
Darling,
This love will not cure me.
This love will not scrape the blood from the baseboards, but it will turn all the lights on,
It will bring basil back from the farmers market and it will plant it in every windowsill,
It is the kind of love that gives me goosebumps,
When you say to the ghost "If you're staying, then you better make room",
And we kiss against the walls, that tonight are not shaking. So we turn the music up and we dance to Miles Davis,
We turn the music up and we dance to Miles Davis and you say
My God,
This house,
The way that it stands even on the months that no one goes into or comes out of it,
How reckless,
The way that I love like the first chapter of a ghost story,
Like a gentle hand,
reaching out of a grave,
