I stood there above your ghost, watching for months as the demons ravaged your body. Alone inside your own head, trying to figure out whether you were listening to the voices or becoming one of them. Tapping on the door three times before you turned the lights out, like a ritual, like superstition was the only thing still keeping you alive.
Your body was a frail remembrance of what it once was, before you got in the way of yourself. Before belief was turned into a weapon. They told you to believe in something, anything, and then took it all away. The lies they told cut deeper than you ever realized because they were dressed up as hope.
I stood at the last place you would ever rest without a sleepless night or terror living behind your eyes. You tried to replace me. You tried to run back to the places that were familiar. Run faster than the speed of light, as if distance could save you from memory.
But there I always was.
Standing in the doorway.
In a crowd of stranger’s faces.
Under the neon light.
Behind your eyelids when the world went quiet.
You saw me every time you closed your eyes.
You tried to hold onto that one moment because you knew you could never get the moment back. You told yourself I was nothing. That I was nobody. Just another story in a notepad, in a box of other random things that would get carried and then forgotten, left in an empty closet like it never mattered.
The bullet should have gone off, but it got caught in the chamber. That would have been easy. Easier than rising and falling all over again. Easier than becoming your own best friend and your worst enemy at the same time. Easier than looking in the mirror and realizing the person staring back had learned how to lie better than anyone else ever could.
But still, you held on. Pretending the knife was only in my back. Pretending you were never the one holding it. You only hang out down there because you know at any time you can climb back up the ladder. But the ladder keeps getting taller and the light keeps getting smaller, and one day you realize you’ve forgotten what you were even climbing toward.
Until suddenly, one day, you outlived my ghost.
And here we sit under the willow tree on a park bench, staring face to face with one another. There is so much you want to tell me, but the words won’t come out. You look at me like you’ve known me for a thousand lifetimes. I don’t look the same, but I’m still the same. Different somehow. Either the world changed me, or you did. Maybe you’ve seen too much to go back to that place you once called something. The closest and the furthest away you’ve ever been at the same time.
The sun isn’t the same here.
Winters are colder.
Loneliness has gotten so comfortable that together feels foreign.
I look at you now, older, withered, worn down by your own journey. I want to smile. I want to hug you. But I can’t. And I won’t. I know where you’ve been. I know what you’ve done. The rooms you stayed in. The places you should have never gone. The versions of yourself you created just to survive the day.
Sometimes I think what a cruel world this must be for people who don’t know what they’re doing while they’re doing it.
Ah, I’m so much happier now.
I did this.
I did all of this.
All on my own, just like I said I would.
I lived the plan. I walked the walk. And instead of sitting next to you on this park bench, drowning in nostalgia, I don’t see the romance in it anymore. My heart feels sad for all the life you’ve missed. I don’t feel anything for you now. Not love. Not anger. Not even resentment.
Just distance.
I look at you like the person who never quite got it. The one who keeps searching for the very thing they already had. Letting it slip through their hands like sand on a beach. A sunrise at dawn you were too busy surviving to notice.
Fleeting is the moment you overlook.
And some ghosts don’t haunt you because they’re dead.
They haunt you because they finally learned how to live without you.
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