Boo, I guess

I used to have the distinct feeling on the days I worked from home that I was haunting my own apartment. It felt spooky to be there during the hours when it ought to be empty, watching the sunlight seep into corners I wasn’t used to seeing it touch. I would sit there taking in the quiet that only exists at 3 pm, when it feels like everyone is somewhere else, and feel alone in a way that simultaneously comforted and unsettled me.

Now, of course, I’m home all the time, and have been for the better part of a year, so I don’t experience it quite the same way. Still, there are times when I think, “What’s the difference between me and a ghost?” and I can’t think of an answer opaque enough to allow me to shake the question entirely (I do far too much pacing around my apartment in the middle of the night to completely discount the thought).

I have this framed illustration of a sheet ghost holding a potted plant that my sister’s ex girlfriend drew. It spent a few months in my sister’s apartment before I brought it to mine. Every time I spotted it at her place I would ask when she was going to put it up, until eventually she just gave it to me.

Now it hangs above the kitchen table where I spend most of my waking hours, working, texting people I can’t see, and snooping through real estate listings when I feel like suspending reality for a few moments to imagine starting a new life somewhere else. I sit beneath it and try to remind myself that I had a life, have a life, will continue to have a life, despite what feels like so much evidence to the contrary.

In June, I rented a car and drove to London to visit my parents. While I was there, I sifted through a box my mom has held onto over the years that’s full of drawings, notebooks, and school assignments from my childhood. I wanted to get in touch with my kid self, I think; see what she was into and what she cared about and all that.

The answer — even then, what a little freak! — was ghosts. I wrote about them constantly. I drew little sheet ghosts on everything with speech bubbles coming out of their mouths that said “O o o o o.” For many years, it seems, anything I wrote for any class assignment prominently featured some ghost character or another.

I even shoehorned this theme into what should have been more straightforward assignments, like the one where it appears I was asked to create a brochure for any kind of business and I made one for a ghost rental service (for when one feels they cannot simply drop out of a social engagement and can instead opt to send a ghost to spook some people and send them running, absolving the renter of having to fulfil said obligation).

I don’t remember where this fascination started or why it persisted, but I can think back to those years and see that I felt so similarly then to how I do now; like my time didn’t really belong to me and that I was not able to participate in my surroundings the way I wanted to. It seems obvious that what I felt towards ghosts was a kinship, rather than a fear.

Whatever link is lying between my unconscious mind and my attachment to the spectral plane may forever remain a mystery, but I don’t see my interest flagging anytime soon. My favourite question to ask people I’ve recently met is whether they have any good ghost stories. I love hearing them, and I encourage people to recount them with as much detail as possible, throwing as many follow-up questions their way as I can afterwards.

I need these stories relayed to me vicariously because, despite my lifelong devotion to the afterlife, I’ve never even seen a ghost on my own. Can you believe that? Being a chronic insomniac, I’m even awake most nights between 3 and 5 am — prime ghost-viewing hours, if any horror movie worth its salt is to be believed.

In July I had a birth chart reading over Zoom, though, and the astrologer told me to get ready for “a major shift in consciousness” in about five years. She said things were going to get weird. I don’t think I have to tell you what I hope that means, but I will anyway: I just want to see one goddamned ghost. I’ve certainly waited long enough, and maybe there’s one out there waiting for me, too. We could keep each other company, just for a little while.