the ghosts that we knew

double speak

I am a secret. Late at night, when she comes home from school, while the rest of her friends are at parties and dance class, I come out to play. With a sharp tongue and metaphors that are pulled from my fingers like notes are plucked from a rusting violin, I come alive only through the tap-tap-tap of flesh against a keyboard. It's a melodic sound, something soothing and righteous even for her -- during the day, she wonders when I will return, wonders how long she will have with me before I melt into the background once more.

She has friends from Vancouver and Bruno and Nova Scotia, but my best friends study English at UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina, grew up in Tasmania, obsess over Teen Wolf all the way from the Netherlands. She writes responses to poems and essays about her childhood, while I have lived a thousand lives and have characters in my head whom I know will never leave. They sit quietly as she learns about trigonometry and scientific notation, stay hidden while she fills her head with tales of Westeros and the Capitol. It is I who takes their hands and leads them from the shadows of her mind onto a laptop screen, where they come alive.

She's not ashamed, perhaps, of the hobbies I have, but she doesn't tell anyone of the Harry Potter RPG site I've made my home out of. She's not chagrined by the company I keep, yet they stay stored within her laptop, her phone, her heart. When I shake the dust from my bones and set my fingers against the keys, she shrinks back into a place she knows I cannot find.

Here is where she becomes me, where these characters of mine become their own entities -- Tristen Hunt rides a motorcycle and mourns the death of her husband, Jesse Middleton wears skinny jeans and can't remember his past, Micah Anderson pretends he is Peter Pan and tells himself not to fall back into old habits, and Frankie Baudelaire weaves crowns out of flowers and plays with fire. They have become as real as I am -- and yet, does she believe I am real? When she smiles at her friends and answers questions in class, does she feel me clawing at her throat just as these characters claw at mine?

I am loud and brash and cry too often. I write stories on the internet and live with the demons that plague my characters. They are not real, she says, but I disagree.

Perhaps she is the one who is only a ghost.