Capsule Stories Autumn 2021 Edition - VonKampen Carolina

Featuring poetry and prose, Capsule Stories Autumn 2021 Edition explores the theme Dancing with Ghosts. These stories, poems, and essays grapple with home, history, and identity. Read about digging up family secrets, listening to the whispers of a place's memories, grieving someone who's gone but not dead, and making space for the unknown and unknowable. Capsule Stories Autumn 2021 Edition is the perfect book to curl up with on a chilly autumn day.

Dancing with Ghosts

There was a small cutout in the wall of a place you used to call home. You would sit in the hole, surrounded by walls and space, walls that were close together, space that felt limitless. Sometimes you would sit there and just think, let your mind wade through the distorted memories, seeing your life played back, rippling, as if you were underwater. Eating at the dinner table, engrossed by the sequel of a book you loved. Staring out into the small audience at your spelling bee, the absence of your parents weighing heavily. Sitting on the concrete with your back against the wall, silent, the noise of your classmates fading into the background, as the wind stirs a pile of dead leaves beside you.

You are a mosaic of the people who have let themselves into your life, of what they did to you, for you, around you. You let others make a home inside you to avoid feeling empty. You have always been more of a wallflower, waiting for things to happen to you, not feeling like you had the agency to make things happen for yourself. You might get the occasional rush of inspiration, the adrenaline propelling you to move forward. These are the moments that you want to be perceived by, but not the moments that you believe you are made of. These moments that pass through you, that happen to you-will you ever learn to grasp them before they dissolve?