Spectre

First posted in November 2020.

I was so used to being invisible, I didn’t notice at first. I think everyone who lives alone has an element of wondering if they’re dead because they have no way of knowing, no other person to confirm their existence. People like to think they can be truly self-sufficient, confident enough in themselves to require no one else’s acceptance to be happy and fulfilled. Perhaps other people can be.

The beautiful thing about existence is that everything is possible. The terrible thing about existence is no one believes that. People are so desperate to find an illusion that they look for lies everywhere. This person’s faking sick to get out of work, that person’s faking piety to feel superior, this person’s faking poor to get something out of someone else. I never understood why it’s so difficult to accept that people might be telling the truth. People said that made me naive. I just don’t see why it’s somehow more enlightened to think everyone is lying to you all the time about everything.

Personally, I thought I was entirely sensible. One of my favourite things about humanity is the way people shape themselves, how they examine what they feel like on the inside and find ways to express that on the outside. The world’s vast diversity of beauty is irresistible; each utterly unique and breathtaking creation of a human being is a work of art. It only made sense to me that I’d be attracted to people of all descriptions. But somehow, loving everyone isn’t enough. Not queer enough to be queer, not straight enough to be straight, not happy enough with myself to not need someone to tell me I was enough.

I felt guilty for complaining. I got along alright with most people. They just didn’t see me. If I said anything about bisexuality or queerness, they’d sigh and tell me I was faking it for attention or to make myself interesting. So I locked myself inside myself and kept quiet. I thought people couldn’t hurt me if I didn’t give them anything to hurt me with. Turned out their silence hurt me, too.

When people tell you that you aren’t real for long enough, you start to believe them. I’m not sure how qualified I am to tell you about life and death; I’m still not sure when one became the other for me. Drifting through the world unnoticed was my specialty long before I became a ghost. I was so focused on making sure no one saw me that I couldn’t discern when they stopped being able to see me.

One day I came home, fumbling in my pocket for my keys outside my door, and heard my neighbours talking in low voices.

“I keep hearing things through the wall,” one of them said. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, holding herself tight. “Doors opening and closing, someone walking around.”

The other shook his head, smiling in gentle reassurance. “It must be mice.”

I found the key and opened the door. Before I could step through, the first one who spoke gasped.

“Mice don’t open doors!” she hissed in a whisper.

I frowned. “It was me. I’m right here.”

“It was the wind,” cajoled the other. “A window must have been left open inside.”

I closed the door behind me and double-checked all the windows. Over the next few days, I noticed that cars didn’t stop when I was crossing the road, no one held the elevator when I ran to catch it, no one apologised for trodding on my toes. None of this was out of the ordinary for me, but I kept a list of the experiences in my mind in a way I hadn’t before. I waved my hand in front of someone waiting next to me at a crosswalk and they didn’t blink. I went into work and knocked things off my boss’s desk. She shrugged and ignored it.

“It’s me!” I had hardly ever raised my voice at work before, but now I stood before my boss yelling. “See me! Look at me!”

But of course, she didn’t.

Time passed. I watched movers take my things out of the flat and bring someone else’s in. I thought about going somewhere else, but I liked the new tenant’s style. She didn’t even repaint the walls. I sat across from her at breakfast and dinner, and watched TV shows with her until she fell asleep. Having a friend who didn’t speak to me wasn’t really a new situation for me. But something about her seemed different to the friends I’d had in life. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable the way it had been for me before.

Believe it or not, I had tried to respect her privacy—at least, as much as I could have, being a ghost in her flat. I didn’t go into what was now her bedroom, or follow her out of the flat, or anything like that. But one night, idly passing the open bedroom door, I looked in and saw her crying and writing in a journal. I figured that if I’d still been alive, I’d have asked her what was wrong, so going in to read over her shoulder was reasonably the best I could do in my current state.

What I saw there could have been written by me. She, too, was told she wasn’t really who she said she was, that she was just going through a phase, that she was pretending for attention. How I longed to reach out to her and let her know she wasn’t alone! How I cried with her and begged her to see me. I thought if only she could see me, I could help, somehow. If only by letting her know she wasn’t alone. But it was no use.

She cried herself to sleep, eventually, just the way I used to. I walked around the flat aimlessly, dragging my numb hands across shelves, touching objects I couldn’t feel. I wandered over to a window and looked out over the sleepy world. Clouds picturesquely obscured one edge of the moon while the steady lights of an airplane glided across the sky. Most windows were dark, but there were still a few lights on here and there.

In the building across the street, a moving curtain caught my eye. I looked down and saw someone standing in the window. The moonlight cast on him made his skin look blue. His big, dark eyes gazed up beneath long eyelashes. It took me a moment to realise he was staring directly at me. I turned over my shoulder to see if my flat’s new tenant had awoken and come up behind me, but there was no one but me. When I turned back, the figure in the window was gone.

The next day, I watched the woman in my flat get ready for work like nothing was wrong. I watched her lock herself inside herself like I always had, and spoke, though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “Please, don’t make yourself less than you are,” I said, speaking over her shoulder as she looked into a mirror with one reflection in it.

After she left, I meandered around the flat and once again found myself at the window, looking down at where I thought I’d seen someone the previous night. No one was there, but I kept my gaze on the spot while I thought. For all the time I’d spent hoping someone would see me, I didn’t expect that I’d feel so shaken when I thought someone finally did. It was hardly much to go on; it could just as easily be a trick of the light and wishful thinking. But I never could convince myself to disbelieve.

I couldn’t keep waiting for it to happen again. Even if I had the rest of time to wait, I didn’t want to be patient anymore. It felt like someone had finally reached out a hand to me, and I had to reach back. I counted the windows in the building and estimated where that flat could be before leaving my flat and running across the street.

As I climbed the stairs, a heart I no longer had beat wildly in my chest. I took the steps two at a time, so lost in my hurry that I nearly missed the floor I needed. I oriented myself, calculating which side faced my building, and counted rooms until I thought I had the right one. I stood in front of the door. Breath from non-existent lungs exhaled shakily from my chest. I knocked three times.

He opened the door, looked at me, and smiled. “Hi.”

It was so normal it caught me off guard. I looked over my shoulder, once again confirming no one else was behind me. I turned back to him. My lips weren’t used to genuine smiling, twitching in and out of the proper shape. “Hi. You can see me?”

“Yeah.” His smile widened. “Yeah, I see you.”