Ghosts {L.P.}

1:05

Ｇｈｏｓｔｓ Ｒｕｉｎ Ｅｖｅｒｙｔｈｉｎｇ

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 0:20

Many kids went to therapy.

Not many kids went to therapy because they saw ghosts.

At first, the therapist Riya had been sent to feed at her so-called delusions, he spent session upon session listening to her rants.

Rants about how she saw a man in the street walk straight past another man as if he weren't even there. How another girl she saw parked outside her school poofed out of sight in a shimmer of light. And even how she got swarmed by various people after they discovered she could see them, every last one of them asking for answers she couldn't provide and fading through her body until she felt as cold as what she supposed death felt like.

When they hit their eighth session, the therapist stopped listening and started talking. He talked about how she created a fantasy because she craved talking to her mother even if it was as a ghost. How, none of which she saw was real, and it was all a product of her traumatized imagination after being alone with her father's job and a dead mother.

He tried medicine too expensive for her father's pay-check, hypnotherapy in a whole different state they had to drive to, and even tried the harsher approach of saying all her truths to her face. Nothing worked, ghosts still swarmed around her like bees to their hive.

Riya wasn't proud of it, but she eventually learned how to lie.

Whenever the therapist asked about ghosts, she lied, said they didn't exist, confirmed she was just a traumatized child. When she saw a ghost down the street, she no longer pointed it out to her father. And if a ghost spotted her, choosing to cling to her with its cold fading hands—which only passed through her body like a cold mist—Riya kept her discomfort to herself.

As far as anyone knew, ghosts didn't exist.

So suddenly, she was cured. No more ghosts meant no more therapy. No more therapy meant a less stressed father trying to keep up with a bill too lengthy for his strained alimony. It should've all been well.

Should've.

Because in the eyes of medicine and her father, she was fine. In the eyes of children and pre-teens, not so much.

No one wanted to hang out with the ghost girl—as they called Riya. No one sat with her at lunch, claiming they wanted to give her and her ghost friends some privacy. No one played with her in recess, saying they didn't want to interrupt the game of make-believe she had going on. And no one even looked at her in class, too busy studying myths and legends—according to her classmates.

The loneliness her father felt in their house spread to school, Riya's safe-heaven becoming that little corner in her father's room, the one under her mother's picture. At least in her apartment, she had music and her mother's spirit to keep her company, her bright smile looking down at her as every new song was written in her notebook by her daughter's hand.

Now, at age sixteen, Riya had become the ghost all her classmates had thought she spoke to. Only her teachers were able to see through the mist walking past their halls, earphones tightly placed into her ears blasting her mother's old music to drag her through the day before she could wrap herself in her note-filled embrace.