Is This What You Wanted? To Live in a House That is Haunted

You said time would heal us—that viewing the body was unnecessary. Everyone grieves in their own way, I suppose. You dust memento-laden shelves as if tending a grave, all while secretly killing time at the cemetery. I stayed too long at that funeral. That’s just how I’m built—to feel things to the marrow, to place shimmering coins on the eyelids of the dead. I fixate on every detail just to bring myself back through.

Spectres don’t stay disenfranchised forever. With time, they integrate—even if it takes years. I’m back in my body again. Eventually, I put my best white dress on, and nobody could tell the difference. You were the only one to see me crumble, like I always said I would when I warned you not to hold me up.

And yet…

We’re not supposed to be here—not supposed to summon those things. In this long-neglected house, ghosts graze past in some other life, haunting each other behind one-way screens. Orbs float on the periphery like dead lovers separated in the cemetery. Footsteps echo in corridors of yesterday, the air thick with smoke from a fire long extinguished. You’d deny it, but some would call it unfinished business.

I wouldn’t try to tend to it now. You really wish I wouldn’t, anyhow. But I’ll revere it, even as I feel the chill. It’s not warm here anymore; the heat’s been off for some time. Rooms empty, left unfilled—no tiny footsteps reverberating like we sometimes pretended. Nowhere left to wander except an attic to store things meant to be preserved but rarely touched.

You keep me there for a reason—hidden behind a door you rarely unlock, pacing just outside. Occasionally, you press your palm against the wood just to make sure I never left, like a ritual. Sometimes I call out when I sense your presence lingering beneath the cobwebs in the door-frame. My fragility always betrays me. Part of me needs you to remember that I’m still alive in there—a living, breathing thing, not a pretty relic made for silent worship.

It’s only lately you whisper back—tone flat and static—so it’s not an incantation. Is that all you’ve got to say? I don’t blame you. I know why. Residual magic. Residual pain. But what we had is gone, save for the memories. I can’t do anything to hurt you now. I won’t exhume the body. I just had to fully grieve before I buried it. Maybe that’s the wrong way—I don’t know—but I accept it now.

It took time, but I made sense of the death. That’s all I wanted.

And still, there’s a girl inside me who makes art on tombstones—reminders that dead things were once beautiful. I don’t ask if they still are, because now I know that epitaphs don’t lie.

This is what it’s like to live in-between—to be able to let go and still accept the lingering presence of a ghost. Everything crumbles and is eventually swallowed by the earth. The most rotten parts feed themselves to the worms. Where it used to cut to the bone, now there’s only empathy and reverence.

This old house creaks and groans with it.

And sometimes, faintly, footsteps still tap on the floorboards outside the door.