HUNGRY GHOSTS

you can only become a ghost to so many people before you haunt your own life

i’ve been thinking about ghosts. and ghosting. and all the undead ghosts we walk through life with. the spiritual presence of others that stay in our cells and our brains long after their bodies have moved on from our proximity—that alive type of haunting.

we all have ghosts. and we all are ghosts. we have all let ourselves become a shadow on someone else’s consciousness—this is inevitable to some extent as we grow and become new versions of ourselves and live into new dreams and futures.

but in the high age of anxiety and avoidance, some people are more ghost than person. they are splintering—and hungry. untethered spirits with empty bellies. like Voldemort and his Horcruxes.

you can only split the soul so many times before your Self becomes so unstable it can barely hold to your body. you can only become a ghost to so many people before you haunt your own life.

we live in an era where self-isolation has been rewritten into a bible of self-care. where the advice we see screaming at us from all directions is to protect our peace at all costs. but what is the cost?

one of my hobbies is chatting with strangers on the internet. some people might call it online dating, but that’s not how i think about it. i have no intention of dating or even meeting many of the people i chat with—which i often tell them upfront, but ask if they’d still like to chat. i ask them about their lives and sometimes tell them about mine. i ask them to send me songs or tell me stories. i collect little pieces of their humanity. some of them stick around in my phone for months of even years. i call them my internet friends. i send them things that remind me things they told me. they send me random photos from their lives.

i believe in internet karma (and regular karma too).

i believe that as much as we can become ghosts, we can also become angels.

we can send blessings to people we’ve never met. we can say prayers for strangers.

we can choose to forgive even when the apology never came.

we can love with abandon.

we can leave the porch light on and slip quietly into the summer night, we can watch our ghosts gather like moths and hold our palms open and say—you too, are welcome here, you too, have had a hand in my becoming.