D.M. Pulley
I write to commune with the ghosts buried inside my head. They were always there, waking me up at all hours with nightmares, lurking in my favorite books, luring me into spooky old houses. An over-active imagination can be a wonderfully maddening thing. Growing up, I slept in my closet for a year for fear of the tiny aliens living under my bed. I would sit and stare at my neighbor’s doll collection for hours, not moving. I was a strange child.
As an adult, I spent ten years wandering abandoned office buildings and historic landmarks as a forensic engineer and preservationist. The footsteps of the thousands of people that had walked there seemed to follow me down the hallways. The stories trapped between the walls of each old building were whispers in my ear. Perhaps I conjured ghosts out of loneliness or quiet desperation as I searched for meaning in my own life, but I stopped and listened for them. Hushed voices muddled together with echoes of clacking typewriters and the swish of cheap stockings. Urgent tales of loss, betrayal, murder, and love hung in shadows all around me, just out of reach.
It wasn’t until I sat down at a computer to write that I could finally untangle them—the lonely secretary on the eleventh floor, the homeless squatter in the empty building, my missing grandmother. These imagined characters want to tell me something. I write so I can hear them.