You Are Not A Ghost

The afternoon light is flat and heavy, the kind that makes dust motes look like they are hanging in midair, suspended in the middle of a day that refuses to move forward or backward. You are scrolling through faces that used to say your name without hesitation, people who knew the rhythm of your laugh before it got quiet, and now you feel like a ghost haunting your own history.

It is a specific kind of loneliness to be surrounded by evidence that you were once real to someone, yet feel entirely invisible in the present moment. But listen — the light does not live in the past tense.

It is not trapped in the JPEGs or the memories or the versions of you that other people remember. There is a luminous thought hidden inside you right now, in this quiet room, that the powers of forgetting cannot see.

You are not a ghost. You are the vessel where the light has chosen to dwell again, today, in the middle of this long, ordinary hour.