The couple married... Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards.

Each step I took turned into a slide and nearly the splits. We were trying to walk around the graveyard with a sense of reverence but everything was icy, which was only to be expected for the New Year's side of winter. I'd worn the worst possible shoes, heeled boots with no grip. In my defence, I'd been wearing them the night before, a night I'd spent with someone I thought I was falling in love with, a poet I'd met at a poetry reading, being that I was, at that time, also a poet.

Crashing someone else's romantic trip to Heptonstall the next day made sense. I didn't feel much reading Plath's gravestone. The Hughes name was visible. We all got the giggles trying not to fall over on our way back to the car. On the drive home, we listened to a ripped audiobook of "The Bell Jar", read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She said modest conch and my mouth watered. The window glass was cool on the side of my head and I breathed deeply of my life, this life of donning faux fur coats to honour long-gone poets with spontaneous types on a Sunday.

I have been entirely unoriginal in my attempts to be exceptional. And I desperately wanted to be exceptional. Life was expansive and strange, so I'd be missing out if I didn't act accordingly. I told myself that I wasn't afraid of death, just of not living life to the fullest, as if they were mutually exclusive. Did I fall hard and fast with poets, artists, and freaks, or was I only ever in love with my own capacity for change? And was that not indistinguishable from magic?

Well, when astrology roared back into fashion, that suited me just fine. My mum would send me an email every night with my horoscope for the next day. After she died, a steady source of star chat was waiting for me. Across apps and websites, millennials plotted our own constellation of speculation and awe. We had drawn back the curtain to commune with something ancient, something resonant. The accuracy we found convinced us of its truth rather than of our own predictability, this humdrum humanity.

We had form. This didn't come from nothing. We tried a bunch of spooky things, lunar rituals and exploring abandoned buildings among them, but we didn't go in for ouija boards. Not out of respect for the dead or fear of their retribution, we just couldn't imagine why any ghost would want to talk to us. Surely they had better things to do. Besides, we were haunted enough. Of course a couple of newlywed poets, at the beginning of their own myth-making, would be drawn to it. I can almost see them. Their fingers touching, determining together, letter by letter, messages from the other side. Desire, that ultimate summoning.

Ouija boards work thanks to the ideomotor phenomenon. A person makes tiny motions, prompted by a tremor in their unconscious mind, body unaware but responding nevertheless. For the subject, it feels entirely external, stemming from the object. A back and forth takes place, just not between two distinct parties. There is a ghost that happens to be alive, that persists, that transforms. Perhaps the board became a screen and the spirit moves through code. Where do ideas come from anyway?

Do I have to spell it out for you?