of pain and ghosts

A girl stood alone in her bedroom.

The sun was setting slowly across the mountains, engulfing light and color and life, bringing back the
now-familiar darkness of the night. The trees outside her room, usually alive and green and full of birds,
lost their shape, dissolving into floating pools of black ink. Tendrils seemed to reach towards her, pressing
against the windowpane, calling, beckoning, luring. But the girl stood there, oblivious to the growing
darkness outside. She was shaking, holding her hand close to her mouth, sobbing silently. Her shoulders
hunched forward as if saying that, this time, it was all too much; the weight had finally become
unbearable. She sank to the floor, gasping for air.

The ghosts materialized as the last pink light in the sky was swallowed up by the deep blue. She knew
them all: the boy with grey scars on his wrists, the old lady with the wrinkled face and sad eyes, the
soldier with a bloody stump instead of a hand. The mother clutching a small motionless figure tight to her
chest, the martyr with red holes decorating his body. They stood silently around her, their pale bodies a
bright contrast to the darkness of the room. Their faces wore the same expression, one of having felt the
true depths of pain.

They looked at the girl accusingly.

She was still as before, crying silently. The only thing different was that on her hand now lay her phone,
glowing steadily against the dark. She clutched it, her hand shakingly bringing it close to her face. It
shone against the bloodshot eyes brimming with tears, obscuring the judging faces of the ghosts from her
view. The girl opened her contact list and scrolled, looking for a person. It was always the same person.

And she found it, the name she had been searching for. It was there. The person was there, a call away.
Her finger inched slowly towards the screen, shaking slightly. One call away. Just one tap away.

The girl sighed. She looked up and found eyes staring back at her, bearing the same question. For a
moment, the ghosts forgot their inculpatory glances. Their shoulders bunched up in excitement, and they
all stood on their tiptoes. Waiting, hoping that this night would be different.

But they remembered, they always did. They stopped nodding and smiling, their faces suddenly clouding
with disbelief, hatred, pain.

They looked at the girl accusingly.

She stared back. Before, that look used to silence her, forcing her to dry her tears and swallow her sobs. It
made her turn off the phone, put it on silent, forget about the person. When the ghosts stared at her they
seemed to remind her that out there, somewhere, there was pain. True pain. That someone had it worse.
That ​they​ had had it worse.

And that she had no right. No right at all to shout out for help.

But there, that night, the girl wondered for the first time if she belonged with the ghosts. There, that night,
the girl stared back; eyebrows scrunched together, mouth tight, eyes tired and broken and brimming with
tears. She wondered if tonight she finally had it worse.

In the room next door, the voices that had been so cautiously quiet some minutes ago exploded suddenly
with the force of twenty years of unhappiness. One of them was louder, screaming across the stillness of
the night, trying desperately to have someone listen, care, heal. The other voice was softer, with a hint of
tiredness. It had stopped caring time ago.

They screamed as they always did, shouting the same words into the darkness. Words that had somehow
stayed alive, boiling with hatred, for so many years. As they were breathed into the night, the girl could
not help but ​see them​, sensing the story behind them. A bleeding heart, ripped by indifference; a
crossroads of past and present; a cracked mirror; unforgiving eyes. A question. A question. A question.

It was always the same.

Do you even love me?

The ghosts stirred next to the girl, sensing her agitation. Her face, which had previously conveyed such
tiredness and affliction, slowly hardened. The girl let go of the phone, forgetting that moment of
weakness, of despair. She stood up, rolling her shoulders, setting her mouth. Her eyes were bleak,
unfeeling, trained. The girl breathed deep, once, twice, and sighed.

She walked to the room next door.

The girl stood alone in her bedroom.

It was darker now without the ghosts. They had left right as she walked to the room next door, seeming to
know that their job was done, that the girl wasn’t going to cry out for help. That she was going, once
again, to try and single-handedly stop the voices.

It had worked. For now.

And in the darkness she stood, staring to the world outside. She remembered the first time the ghosts
appeared. They weren’t really ghosts, just figments of her imagination, but at first the girl liked to think of
them as supernatural, if only to believe that something about her life was so singular and unique that dead
people crossed the threshold between Life and Death only to visit her.

That used to be before, when the ghosts had no backstory, no faces, no eyes bearing the weight of pain
and despair and affliction. It was impossible to know when that had changed; when they went from
simple companions to cold remainders. When instead of comforting her, they stared accusingly, forcing
her to believe that ​she had no right, no right, no right.

She knew them all.

The boy with the scars had been in a foster home, moved from family to family, never knowing who he
was. He had been hit, molested, ignored, hated. The boy had never been held tight, strong arms enclosing
him, giving him love. He had stopped speaking, crying, feeling. He had taken his life.

The old lady had lived by herself for twenty years. She had lost a baby early on in her marriage, carving
the first small grave in her backyard. Her husband hit her, screamed at her, cheated on her, and told her he
loved her. That messed up her head. She lost her son to a car accident, her daughter to depression, her
husband to drinks. And she lost herself to grief.

The soldier had been engaged before the war to a loving girl. He had written her poems and letters every
day for three years. They were in love. Two days before his leave, on which he was going to marry the
girl, the soldier lost a hand, but survived. For the night. He died early the next day from an infection.

The mother had run away from her war-torn country, fleeing with her child. They walked for days,
starving slowly. They found a man who promised to take them across the sea, to a world of opportunities
and peace… and food. For three months, the mother and her child lived on a slave boat, working
endlessly. At the end, the ship was found, the man convicted and the slaves released. The mother arrived
to the shore holding her dead child.

The martyr was a young man. He had worked with homeless children, trying to keep them away from
drugs and gangs and vices. But he couldn’t always save the children. One of them, a boy, had ran away,
joined a group. They welcomed him in, but first asked him to prove his loyalty, his willingness to kill for
them. The martyr was the target, a stolen gun the weapon.

She knew them all. And they knew her.

They knew all the tears she had shed in the darkness, tears that had eroded her heart, bringing out stone.
They had been witnesses to her despair and anger. To her loneliness. And now that they were gone, she
missed them. Their stares, even if judgemental at times, reminded her that she was seen. That someone
knew. That the stifled sobs and tired sighs were not just thrown into the void, ignored. That her daily
struggle to find strength and courage was not overlooked.

It was all she could ask for.

Maybe that was why she let the ghosts stay and judge her. Maybe that was why she kept putting her
phone away, not calling the person, telling herself that she could do it alone. As long as she kept
struggling under the weight of pain and screams, the ghosts would be there, reminding her that she had ​no
right, no right at all. The pain would cease to hurt her, she knew. Yes, it would deplete her energy,
leaving a carcass behind: sunken eyes, hunched shoulders, tired smiles. But time would make her numb,
and nothing would wound her.

​And as long as ghosts were there, she was not alone. She was understood.

It was all she ever wanted.