When Bug says that imagining himself as a teenage girl is like staring at the sun, he means that it feels painful and strange. I know your stomach can’t itch from the inside, but that’s what it’s like. A squirmy, itchy sensation starts to expand in my stomach. Thinking about being an adult, a woman, makes me feel like I’m looking up at the stars but there’s nothing holding me to the earth, and I might fly off into the void at any moment. Trying to picture myself as a teenage girl is like staring at the sun, too bright to see, and it hurts. Bug's comment is illuminating in that it immediately shows how profoundly the death of his uncle has impacted everyone in the house. These objects, like ghosts, remain in the house, reminding Bug and his mother of a person they loved who is now missing. He makes the distinction that this other kind of haunting is from the presence of physical objects that his uncle will never use again. The narrator previously says that his house has been haunted for a long time but now is afflicted by a new sort of problem. This early moment reveals how the book's main conceit, a haunted house, has a very real, not supernatural, emotional weight. His winter boots are jammed in the closet. There's a half-empty jar of okra Uncle Roderick picked and pickled that he'll never finish eating, and Mom and I both hate okra. A way that's both more boring and more frightening. But now this old house seems haunted in a different way.
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