The Ghost Knew Better Than to Stay

Everyone here gets visited.

I have watched it happen. I have sat in the same room

with people who do not sleep right anymore,

who laugh a second too late,

who have learned to hold their face

in a particular way in public

because the alternative

is explaining something

The ghost finds them in the ordinary hours.

at three in the afternoon,

in the middle of a meal,

in the shower,

one sentence and the next

when suddenly the pause

becomes a country

with no embassy,

no return flight,

no one who speaks the language.

It finds them there. It stays.

Some of them it has never left.

But it does not come for me anymore.

And I want to be careful here

because I am not saying I won.

I am not saying I am stronger

or better or that I found the right medication

on the first try or the second

or that therapy worked the way the pamphlets

describe therapy working,

cleanly, linearly,

with measurable progress charted upward

like a country's GDP in the good years.

I am saying the ghost came.

I want to be precise about this.

It came and it was the specific burden

on the mind that is not a burden.

The specific absence of reason

to get out of bed

that coexists, insultingly,

with a life that has reasons in it,

that has people in it who love me,

that has mornings sometimes genuinely worth waking for.

The coexistence was the worst part.

The ghost did not need me to have nothing.

It only needed access,

and access it had,

because I had left a door open somewhere

that I did not know was a door.

It came and it looked at me

the way it looks at everyone,

measuring how much of me was available,

how much had already been

hollowed out and left warm for occupancy.

And then —

this is the part I do not know how to explain

without sounding like I am making it prettier than it was —

it saw something that made it hesitate.

It saw the specific texture of my particular suffering.

The exact form of what had been done to me

and what I had done to myself

and the long history of the place I came from

living inside my body without my consent.

And the ghost, which has no mercy,

which has never once in my knowledge

showed mercy to anyone I have watched it visit,

felt something that I can only describe

as terrible.

This was something that recognized.

Something that had seen the precise coordinates

of my particular damage

and understood that there was nothing here

it had not already taken.

That I had already been

so thoroughly acquainted with the interior

of what it was offering

that moving in permanently

would have been redundant.

So it left.

because the ghost, which is not kind,

looked at me truly —

the actual thing underneath,

worn and specific and still,

improbably, here —

and it knew my struggle

the way you know a place

you have already stripped of everything valuable.

And it felt, I think,

something close to shame.

And I remained.

Which is,

I have come to understand,

is the whole thing.

It is everything.