All my life.

Albums I can't listen to anymore: Grant Lee Buffalo- Might Joe Moon, the Lemonheads-Varshons, the Bananas- First 10 Years, the Cramps- How to Make a Monster, Dan Melchior and Holly Golightly, R.L. Burnside- A Bothered Mind. There are more, but these are the ones staring me in the face right now. I can't touch them without some bright flash of lips or eyes or hands welling up. The thin ghosts that attach themselves to thighs and notes and sweat and room build up over time if you let their souvenirs rest in your room. At first they only stared at me from the bookshelf, sometimes from the computer or a desk drawer, sitting gaunt and still. There are theorists who say that ghosts themselves, the kind that scare you and open and shut your doors without your permission, are nothing more than the collective thickness of emotions spent in that space. All the afternoons spent fucking or kissing or silent letting the CD run out and the lights stay off, too engrossed in whatever was happening at the time to care about illumination. The phantoms grew out of our sweat, out of our glaring eyes, out of our silent, closed mouths. I could sell CDs by the dozens, I have thousands. There aren't enough years in my life to listen to them all, so I trade in the detritus to get more flotsam, dust for dust, but these talismans, these flat discs and rectangles thick with spectres, I can't touch them. I tried listening to the songs I heard while the sweat cooled off of my stomach and a remarkably handsome boy's back and found myself waking up hours later, the stereo off and my eyes wide open. I tried hearing the songs I cradled to my heart in my warm room, climbing up the stairs at three in the morning after making a hasty and vicious phone call, but I ended up retching after the first note, not ready, and the spirits jumped free and stared from the corner of the room. They never leave, at first I brush past them in the hall, stared at them when sleeping or curled up next to someone else, old eyes and hands and smiles, the looks that make your stomach sink or your blood pound. All we ever want to do is bury ourselves in someone else, to fuck or laugh or love, and all the incidental scraps of paper, pieces of ribbon, records, songs, movies and people that get in the way are tainted with the haunted breath of some ghost or other, unusable, hazardous and poison. There's a billion other records with snapshots of hips and eyes and screams and sobs on them. I don't want to list them, even mentioning their existence sets phantoms to flying all over the room. All this to say exorcise your demons smooth and quick, cut off that limb and cauterize the room immediately. There are a thousand eyes staring at me everywhere now, from roads, from stairwells, from hallways, over buildings, huge and distant. I lie down next to a thousand sighing memories, a room thick with ghosts that never ever go away and keep staring long after the lights are turned off.
And all that is heard over and over again is Thomas fucking Dolby- She Blinded Me With Science.