I felt very upset and nervous about my date with my ex-boyfriend, which surprised me – since he is dead.
Let me explain: when my ex died in 2019, I didn’t feel anything at first. We had walked a lot, many years before, and although we loved each other, we had a lot of unresolved issues. When we broke up, I put it in a heart-shaped time capsule so it would never open again. In addition, I didn’t have enough bandwidth to grieve properly as I spent exhausting hours on the movie set.
Imagine my surprise when, more than a year after his death, I found some of his songs on the internet, songs he wrote about me. They opened my heart as if it were a rainbow bleeding all the colors of delayed grief.
The songs took me back to a chaotic, passionate time when we lived as young artists in trouble in his Silver Lake shoe box. The flood of emotions I felt was so strong that a mutual friend suggested something I had never done before: try to connect with him through a psychic medium.
My meeting with the media began on Instagram live, with the media offering a disclaimer: “The deceased you want to communicate with may not show up, so be open to anyone who shows up.”
I was worried that my ex wouldn’t show up on our extraterrestrial date, and I half-joked, “Will the ghost twist me?”
But it wasn’t funny when the media started telling me things about my ex that she couldn’t possibly know.
“There’s someone here who’s skinny with dark hair. He plays the guitar on the floor and sings you a song. You lived together. “
I froze when I felt my ex materialize as a film negative coming into focus.
“You have his ashes, his remains.” But wait … no, no. I assume his family has his ashes. Could she have thought of the texts that are fragments of his soul? I had these remnants of him.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“You smelled it.”
“Yes,” I said, “is this a posthumous shave? A posthumous aphrodisiac? ”(Humor is my coping mechanism.)
“He wants you to know he loves you,” the media said.
Pink memories of dancing overnight appeared at Sunset Junction Street Fair, the orange dawn as he arranged for me the unexpected death of my cat, a yellow coconut curry in our favorite Indian cafe.
“He’s obsessed with you.”
I felt angry, confused. Why didn’t he say anything from when he was still alive? How do I rekindle a romance with a ghost? (The premise for the TV show came to my mind: “She found the love of her life. There’s only one problem: he’s a ghost.”) So why now? I assumed that ghosts work in ghost times and have no boundaries.
“He wishes I could have told you more sooner. He wants to thank you for taking care of him. “
I remembered the amount of energy I put into the success of his group so he could afford to take us on a long-dreamed trip to Hawaii and then settle into a stable lifestyle. (I didn’t know that yet me wanted to be on stage to make people feel things with comedy and travel to exciting places to work.)
Not-so-rosy memories surfaced a year later when Sunset Junction seemed a darker carnival of chaos.
That night when he said, “We need to talk when we get home,” and I felt green with nausea, fear, envy, and suspicion of his covert sexcapade. At the time, he admitted that his past drug addiction had caused a number of health complications, although he finally sobered up. He said he knew he wasn’t going to live as long as I did, and he wanted to spare me that pain. He said we had to disperse. The confused blues began.
Over the years, we swapped places: the performer I admired calmed down, while I turned my tears into jokes about relationships that took me around the world as a comedian and performed several times in Hawaii. I didn’t know yet that my subconscious goal was to stay unbound and avoid ever being vulnerable again.
“He wants you to know he’s so proud of you,” the media said. “You helped him heal.”
“What’s a big take?” I still asked in astonishment.
“The great thing is, love is eternal.”
Later, I felt like I had some answers, but also some questions.
Now that my heart has been cracked by a person I couldn’t be with, how am I supposed to face trying to get over this during a pandemic? I felt retroactively obsessed and haunted with my ex, who seemed much more present to me than a ghost than he had ever been when we dated.
It seemed to me that maybe someone should create a medium dating app or a dating show – “Medium Matchmaker”? – to help people come to terms with their past in order to become the present for their future. (You know, because if you’re still stuck in the past, then you really live in a haunted house.) Or because my exes have often become my muses and vice versa, a “muse” dating app for those who want to perpetuate their love affair in art … an app similar to Meet Cute, but called Meet Muse instead.
Apparently I had some more research to do. I found a therapist who met me at Zoom, and we reworked the relationship.
Here I saw the whole picture — a picture of crucial, deep love that was supposed to be nothing more than it was. I wanted to save him and
to save me, but instead they removed it so I could save myself. I forgave him and myself for any harm done consciously or unknowingly, and I felt that perhaps I could finally take off my protective jacket, which is impervious to love.
I felt like the gift of grief had changed me.
For our second date, I will ask my ex if he will join me on couples therapy.
She is an actress, LA comedian and podcast creator. “Let’s process this With Melinda Hill”And a new comedy special”Inappropriate. ” On Instagram is @realmelindahill.
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