To feel haunted
On Kate Bush, Emily Brontë, the many lives of illness, coming back to writing, and the grief of our ghosts
It is May 2025 and it is December 2018.
In May, I am twirling around the dining room with Izzy as we dance and sing along to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. My nose starts to run because I am holding back tears, and after kissing Izzy on the cheek and the neck I wipe away the nose drips that transferred to their skin. In a way, this dance feels like a celebration, because my foot has been feeling better after several months of issues. It’s not all the way better, but I can dance clumsily in my little house. A surge of joy is rising inside of me. We just watched that movie Emily with Emma Mackey, the one about Emily Brontë, the Brontës in general. I have no idea how historically accurate it is—probably not very—but watching a movie about a strange, isolated young woman who goes on to write one of the weirdest, most grief-stricken, gorgeous, atmospheric novels of all time is inspiring me to return to my writing, after several months off.
In December, I am in my coworker’s car in Berkeley, California. We just had our soft opening of Bar Sardine, the evening wine bar alter-ego of Bartavelle Café, where I worked at the time. Ben is driving me home, and he just started playing Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Claire is in the passenger seat, I am in the back with Lori, and now Ben is cranking up the volume as loud as we can all stand it. The three of them, closer friends with each other than with me, are singing at the top of their lungs, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard any Kate Bush song, let alone this one. I feel so blissfully happy in this moment. I can’t even make out the lyrics—I vaguely know there is a classic book called Wuthering Heights, but I haven’t read it. I just started writing again, after nearly a decade. I am studying to become a sommelier, trying to work in the Bay Area wine scene, and attending tastings next to Bartavelle at Kermit Lynch, a legendary importer and wine shop. At these tastings, I’m the only woman, the only femme person, and to challenge the “boys club” ideology of the wine world, I started writing poems about the wines I was tasting, to soften the whole idea of wine tasting in general; to make it beautiful. It would be three more years before enrolling at Bennington for an MFA in Creative Writing and write the first draft of a novel. Here in the car, while Kate Bush is singing Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy / I’ve come home, I’m so cold / Let me in your window I look around at these three freaks and think, maybe they could be my people. I see a whole future in front of me—a life in Berkeley, filled with food and wine and freaks and poems. I was diagnosed with RA nine months ago, and I just ran out of the meds I had been given when I was still living in Michigan: prednisone, methotrexate, and folic acid. My left wrist is swollen, but the disease hasn’t yet spread to my right wrist. It will in two weeks’ time. If I had stayed on my meds, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten permanent damage in both wrists, perhaps my bones wouldn’t have fused together. I haven’t found a rheumatologist in Berkeley yet, and I am still very much in denial that this condition will affect my life in a major way. I still have hope that it will just go away, that “incurable” doesn’t apply to me, that I am as able-bodied as everyone else around me.
It is May 2025, and a couple of hours after dancing with Izzy I am listening to Wuthering Heights again while I wash the dishes, and I can’t hold the tears back anymore. I feel my writer brain churning, and I want to write about this song, about Emily Brontë, about being in two places at once, and about how unbearable it can feel to contain this much grief in tandem with this much joy, about how chronic illness often has this effect on me, that I’m living multiple timelines at once, and that I could’ve lived so many different lives if I hadn’t gotten sick, or that I have already lived so many different lives because there is such a stark difference in the life I was living before getting sick, the lives I have had at various stages in my illness, and the life I have now.
I am thinking about Emily Brontë, how she feels like a kindred spirit. So little is known about her, and what we do know comes from Charlotte’s accounts, which are more than likely exaggerated or altered from reality, but it seems safe to say that Emily was shy, somewhat aloof, resistant to social norms, deeply feeling and creative, and a great lover of the moors that surrounded her. I read about Emily going on long walks alone through the wild landscape, and it makes me think of Berkeley again, when I lived with my mom in a 400 sq ft apartment in the hills on the edge of Oakland, and how I would go on solitary walks through the neighborhood every single day. My 5-mile walks through an affluent Bay Area neighborhood are, of course, in no way similar to Emily’s wild journeys through the moors of 19th century Yorkshire, but I feel her in me, in these memories.
I think about how often people tell me I’ m strange or weird or odd, or how frustrated they can get by the bizarre way my brain works, or how annoyed at the way I can be so immersed in writing or reading that I won’t even be able to hear what they’re saying, and I feel Emily in me. I think about the amount of love and lust and passion and loneliness she must’ve felt to be able to write certain passages of Wuthering Heights and I feel myself in her. I think about how I found my way back to writing first through my silly little wine poems, and how I was finally able to write a novel.
I think about how young she was when she died, at the age of 30, and I think about how I am 31 now, in May 2025, how I was 25 in December 2018, how I experienced a kind of death at 24 when I was diagnosed, and what felt like a shift into a new life at 30, and with that shift I also felt another kind of death. There have been many deaths and many new lives. I think about how Emily first knew grief intimately when her mother died at three, and then again when two of her older sisters died, and then again when her brother died, and I think about all of the people living with chronic illness that were diagnosed at a much younger age than I was. I think of Izzy, whose childhood was stolen from them by their disease. Who has, without metaphor, actually come very close to death in the literal sense more than once as a child and as an adult. I think of all the others who have experienced that, and this kind of grief weighs on me, too, that there are so many who have felt even deeper pain and grief than me, and it is a wonder they are still here, that they can even stand it.
I write about grief a lot now—in fact my last Substack, almost six months ago, was also about grief—and I think it’s because I’m just beginning to see how much grief there really is. How there will never not be so much grief. It is enough to bowl me over, to completely collapse. All I can do is feel it. All I can do is write about it. As I write this, I realize it sounds dramatic, but that’s because it is. When your life is bent into a new shape, a shape that involves unbearable pain and an endless flow of shots and pills and, not in my case but in others, surgeries and medical procedures, or in my case specifically, the inability to walk for periods of time, or the domino effects of being immunocompromised, of catching a cold that lasts an entire month, or being forced to reschedule major events (like gender-affirming care, or missing milestones in your friends’ lives), or being forced to care for yourself in a way that feels unnatural because some deep part of yourself resents and maybe even hates your own body because of how it’s malfunctioning, it is dramatic. It’s tragic. The ending of this story can never, ever, be good. Yes there is joy, yes there is pleasure, yes there is love and happiness and fulfillment, but my disease—all disease—is only ever harmful. Izzy and I were talking about this yesterday. There is no silver lining. Maybe my illness brought me back to writing, but that doesn’t mean I’m grateful for it. There is no everything happens for a reason ideology that will ever make being sick okay or worth it or, honestly, ever really bearable. There are days when it feels like too much, when I think to myself how can I ever contain this much feeling? This mush grief? It is enough to stop breathing. It is enough to want to disappear, to not exist, to feel like a ghost of yourself, to feel haunted by all of the ghosts of your past selves to the point where sleep is scarce and the will to live at all feels transparent and easily dissolvable.
I am thinking about Wuthering Heights, the book this time, not the song—or both, maybe. I am thinking about Heathcliff’s grief, about how he calls on Cathy’s ghost to haunt him for as long as he lives, about how he digs up her grave just to be closer to her, that he is forever devoted to a life that no longer exists. The grief that I feel at times makes me understand him, makes me understand this kind of devotion. Songs like Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights feel like digging up the graves of these lives of mine that no longer exist. Songs like this haunt me. These past lives will haunt me forever, but that’s what I want. I don’t want to forget the parts of myself I can no longer have. I don’t want to forget this grief. It wouldn’t feel right. It would make me less of myself. It might be a bit cliché to say this, but I do think it’s true, that feeling the lowest lows also allows me to feel the highest highs. All I want is this wide, spectrum of feeling. As wide as possible. I’m okay with that. And honestly, I’m usually somewhere in the middle. Every day is not a haunting. Only when the veil is thin.
xo, Lys
Out on the wily, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green
You had a temper like my jealousy
Too hot, too greedyHow could you leave me
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you, tooBad dreams in the night
They told me I was going to lose the fight
Leave behind my Wuthering, Wuthering
Wuthering HeightsHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowOoh, it gets dark, it gets lonely
On the other side from you
I pine a lot, I find the lot
Falls through without youI'm coming back love, cruel Heathcliff
My one dream, my only masterToo long I roam in the night
I'm coming back to his side to put it right
I'm coming home to wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering HeightsHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowOoh, let me have it
Let me grab your soul away
Ooh, let me have it
Let me grab your soul away
You know it's me, CathyHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your windowHeathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, March 1977
Emily ❤️🔥
damn that was divine 🩵