Living with a Ghost

Four years ago to the day. September moving the season dial along as light goes gold too early. It’s like fall knows something the rest of the year hasn’t figured out yet.

I sit in the stillness of the morning and sip my coffee. Me, the steam from my mug, the what-if wondering out the window—and you.

You show up in the quiet moments. It’s never dramatic—you were never like that. You show up like a forgotten familiar smell. I’ll hear exactly what you’d say about something stupid on the news, and I’ll laugh out loud at a joke you didn’t tell. As I look down I’m surprised how quickly the coffee has lost its warmth.

It happens in public, too—worse—because in public I have to keep a straight face. I’ll be standing somewhere, half-listening to a stranger talk about the weather, and I’m not there. I’m wherever you are. Somebody asks me a question. I answer half a second late, because I had to leave the room we were sitting in together.

Nobody knows that rooms exists. It took me too long to find it. I thought grief was a wound that closes. But it’s actually a door.

You live somewhere I can’t drive to and can’t call. But you’re not gone in the way I was afraid you’d be gone. Closer than that, and further at the same time. In the space behind my thoughts, you wait for me. You show patience you never had when we were kids fighting over the last piece of cake.

All the mornings alone with the coffee going cold and the moments in a crowd where my body is here and the rest of me isn’t. A brother living now on the other side of something I can’t see, who still, somehow, makes me laugh from there. I’d give anything to have you back in the ordinary.

But recently, I catch myself thinking something still stranger. You’re not the one who’s gone. You hold still, protected by my memory. It’s me who drifts into the buried business of this reality. I forget to walk back into that room and sit with you a while. I’m the one who’s absent—you’re the one who stayed.

Living with a ghost, it turns out, mostly means learning to stop looking away from him.