We All Carry Ghosts

✩ Fragments ✩

Trigger Warning: This piece contains intense feelings of grief and brief thoughts of suicide.

✩ Fragments ✩

When you wake up, something is missing. A person, a memory, a shared experience that is longing to be re-lived, again and again and again until you forget who you are and what it is that makes you alive. It follows you everywhere—to the store, to the kitchen, to your study as you sit down to finish another project, to meet another deadline that's mocking your annihilated heart. But as you sit in front of the blank page, the empty file with your cursor hovering, floating, anxious to be of use, you discover that you no longer have any desire to do anything. Who cares if the deadline comes and goes, never being met? What does it matter if you lose your job or fail this class because he will never have the chance to lose a job or fail a class because he is gone.

You feel numb as you encounter his friends and the ones who knew him best. They laugh and say that your grief isn't real because he wasn't your best friend. He was theirs. They were the ones who saw him last, who witnessed the fury of water as he was swept out of view. You don't know that they will continue to advertise this fact every year in memory of him. You don't know that you hate this, that you mute them on Facebook every May to stop them from ripping your scar tissue open again and again, year after year. In this moment, you don't know that you don't know. But part of you wonders if they're right—if you have a right to grieve for someone who was only a friend. You refuse to cry in front of them. Instead, you fall into yourself and reside in the smallest, weakest memories of him: walking in front of your car after a night with friends, breaking gender stereotypes to sit with the girls during lunch, his final solo during a performance of Dear Evan Hanson's, "Waving Through a Window." You wonder if you'll ever believe that you aren't just waving at the ghost of something that only felt real.

Not even in your dreams can you escape the memory of him that haunts everywhere you look. It is here, in the realm of your unconsciousness, that you finally hug him for the first time. Or maybe it's the second time. You don't know. A bigger part of you doesn't care because the tears are flowing as soon as you awaken and this time, you aren't sure if they will ever be able to stop. What would he think of you? You laugh at the idea because he would smirk and say, "I'm not even gone—it's just temporary. Now stop crying and pull yourself together."

When you step into the shower, you realize just how easy it would be to lose yourself. How easily time slips away with every water droplet, every slathered cell of your shampoo, every inch of soap that clings to your body. How time seems to pause, to float, to hover in between your grief and this new burning, strange reality. You look up at the showerhead and think how easy it would be to end things—to end the suffering, this endless pool of grief that drowns your lungs in acid and anguish. You know that you never will – that you never could – but the idea still haunts you for weeks. You can't shake the feeling that the reunion coming someday will never be soon enough because how could it?

Three years later, you face a writing prompt. Six words stare back at you: Write something in the second person. You have an idea, one you've been trying to write every time the moment arrives, but never quite grasping. Except this time, the words start flowing and unraveling and twisting like never before and you realize that it is now beyond your control.

It may have started as his story—but today it becomes your own.

✩ Author's Note ✩

This is one of the most vulnerable and honest pieces I've ever written about my friend. It was about a story I was tired of trying to write, but knew I had to write anyway . . . And once I started writing, these words simply poured out of me in a way I hadn't anticipated.

Writing this piece was incredibly healing for me. It was a way to honor his memory while finding the final piece of peace that I needed to move on and not let his story overshadow my own any longer.

I hope you love it. <3