We All Carry Ghosts

✩ We All Carry Ghosts ✩

We all carry ghosts:

Real and fictional,

Alive and dead,

Truthful and wasted.

These ghosts,

Like the vowels carrying each and every word across this page,

Sustain us.

I want to believe that there is more to this life

Than inky moonlight grief

That falls over a window seat

Where I pour out my heart

To a God who must still have a plan.

I need to know that these ghosts

Are not a mistake—

That they are meant for more than mere haunting.

I know that one day

He will summon the light.

I know that one day,

He will make it right.

But nowadays,

Trust is like a wisp of cold air

On a rainy winter night:

Faint, fleeting, and gone

Before I can even think about grasping for it.

In these moments,

Hope feels like a foreign, evaporating rope

That I no longer know how to hold.

We all carry ghosts.

Some will forever linger in the edges,

Along the periphery of our lives,

Where they watch but do not speak.

Other ghosts will end up in our photographs

And boxes of lost things.

I do not know your ghosts, dear heart,

For I am only beginning

To recognize my own.

I carry the ghost of a girl

Who stayed up late to live

A thousand-and-one lives

That would follow her forever.

I carry the ghost of a girl

Who wondered if love was more

Than an anchor that had suddenly

Slipped from her frozen fingertips.

I carry the ghost of a girl

Who loved and lost,

Loved and lost,

Loved and lost.

I carry the ghost of a girl

Who thought she'd found forever

In a friend made of stardust,

In a boy made of glass,

In a love that wasn't made to last.

We all carry ghosts

That taught us to laugh a little louder,

That let us believe we were flying,

That came into our lives and changed everything

Only to soar away too soon.

We all carry ghosts,

And these ghosts are us.