By Simon Kerr
The ghost I used to be hasn’t left. I thought that everything went away eventually—childhood friends, acne, menstruation. But she’s still here.
The pain is less. Where once she was a poltergeist, so horrid in her wailing and destruction that anyone could see her, now she’s reduced to paler shades, to just my sight. A double mastectomy was enough of an exorcism to confine her to privacy, at least. Now all she haunts is me.
I’m baking, and her hand overlays mine, her whisper apologetic: Remember, it’s brown sugar you pack, not flour. Remember to point out its flaws as you serve it. I’m pulling a T-shirt over my head, and she cups both hands over my chest to mimic what used to be there. I’m with someone when she uses my throat to cry out, to prove ecstasy is a thing I can’t make new, just reuse. She appears in the future, in my dreams of caretaking and creating, because it never occurred to me to imagine being a father, or a successful male writer, with the odds rather than in spite of them.
She lingers. Then, now, and in moments that never happened.
I don’t always do something to conjure her—sometimes, she’s just here. Tonight, she sits on my sofa. She’s curled up in the corner in a gown I never even wore.
I’m torn between my anger and my exhaustion. I wish for holy water, salt circles, and broken mirrors as a scream builds within me. She hears me when I scream, even when it isn’t out loud, and she knows it’s because of her.
Instead, I take a seat in the center of the couch, and I look at her.
She doesn’t look how I remember looking. That’s not my face shape, that’s not the hair I had. This is a stranger to me. And she looks so fucking sad.
I let her cry, and even though I feel like joining, I can’t, physically can’t. I let it be quiet. I let there be oxygen for her, room and warmth in the blankets, a few comforts of the living. I’ve hated her. I’ve committed her to such violence. I’ve made a vial of poison of her name, let her echo be something that cuts into me. I’ve wished her dead, and tried.
We were together once. She protected me then, in her way, in the way she was taught. She bore the brunt of everything that hurt, and made the days unreal enough to manage. When I came out, when I could look back and see just how far the horizon stretched behind me, just how long I had to walk without breathing, when I shaved my head, when I blocked numbers, when I renamed myself, it didn’t erase the distance or the time. All of that pain couldn’t just vanish. Someone had to hold it.
Here, in the dark, in my home, I stop wishing I never met her. I stop wishing she could be ripped into gossamer shreds. It’s her that still has to inhabit those memories. If all I can do is sweep the goatheads from the wood floors, soften the rolls of thunder, ease the volume of footsteps stomping overhead, I should. I will.
I release an exhale I’ve held for twenty years, and find enough room in the space left to say, “Thank you.”
Simon Kerr (he/they) is a writer and bookseller in Fort Collins, Colorado. They write sci fi and fantasy to express genderqueer experiences and will shamelessly test the resteep limit on a pot of tea. Their short fiction appears online and in several inaccessible zines.
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