Ghosted

by J.M. Darhower

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever loved a story so much they could quote it.

Eyeing her warily, he took a step back, and then another, before turning to leave without saying ‘goodbye’. They’d already said enough goodbyes to last them a lifetime.

I’m the personification of an alternate ending where Phil accepts that he’s stuck listening to Sonny & Cher every morning until the end of time.

“Ghosted.”

It's nearing the end of the story, even though we're still at the beginning of filming. It takes everything out of me, because endings are hard. Endings are fucking impossible... especially endings that remind me of a girl I'm trying damn hard not to think about.

He becomes the wind. He earns his name because he’s like a soft breeze. You know he’s around, you can feel him ghosting across your skin, but unless he shows himself to you, you can’t see him, looking right through him like he’s not even there. I know, it sounds like some crazy sci-fi nonsense, but it’s more of a coming of age story, more of a love story. It’s about selflessness, about sacrificing your own happiness for others, about being there for them even when they don’t know you’re around.

as much as he wishes he could be with her forever, he has to let her go, because that’s what love means. It’s loving someone enough to set them free.

“Could this day get any worse?” “Never say that,” Cliff says. “Because as soon as you say that, it’ll get worse.”

“Am I still an actor if I don’t have an audience?” “Is a writer still a writer if nobody reads what they wrote?”

She spends the weekend re-reading them, just so they’re still fresh in her mind, so when she brings them to school for you to borrow, she remembers every single line.

“I want anything you’re willing to offer me.”

“Sorry for everything I did that led us to this point. And I get it, you know, if you hate me. Wouldn’t blame you at all. But I just need to tell you… I need you to know… that even when I was completely fucked up, I never once stopped loving you.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of cheating. I just wanted to know how long it took you to move on.” “Oh, well, that’s an easy one,” he says. “It hasn’t happened.”

My therapist would tell me it’s unhealthy, that I’m being co-dependent. Jack would probably tell me to stop being a pathetic son of a bitch. Cliff, he’d likely remind me that I have the whole world at my fingertips, but that doesn’t seem to matter, not when the first person to ever truly believe in me looks at me like I’m the worst of the worst.

“Be,” he says. “I wish we could just be.”

“Let’s go somewhere,” he says. “Where?” “Wherever you want to go.”

She has to wear her everyday flats, because she forgot to pack extra shoes. It’s simple. She feels so plain. You tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.

But the world isn’t always kind to good people. Sometimes it eats them alive.

I’m playing with fire, like I don’t remember how much it hurts to get burned, but from here, where I’m standing, all I can seem to feel is the warmth.

We eat breakfast. They chat. They laugh. I mourn. I mourn the years they lost, the time that was wasted, the love that maybe just wasn’t quite enough to overcome his demons sooner. Every smile they share today is the product of years of tears, of years of fighting and struggling and hoping and mourning but never, ever, ever quitting or giving up, because we’re here. And maybe it won’t last, I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow something will happen and the tears will come back, but I’m grateful for the moment, knowing he loves her more than anything.

Okay, okay, so it’s only been three days, but they’re some of the best days I’ve had in years.

I mourn a bit when they cut the cast from my wrist, the saw slicing right through the spot where Kennedy signed it, annihilating her words.

To me, she was the center of the universe, the sunlight that burned so bright, but she writes herself in the shadows, secondary in her own life. Instead, she made me the hero, the center of this alternate universe she invented around her.

You’re the caterpillar that went into the cocoon and emerged a glorious butterfly, but I’m the reminder that butterflies don’t stick around long, a few weeks at most before they’re gone.

What’s ridiculous, I think, is how much my chest aches when I look at him. How much my insides coil when I hear his laughter. How much his smile sets my soul on fire. What’s ridiculous is how lost I feel when I think about the future.

“Is that how I made you feel?” he asks. “It is.” “I’m sorry.” “Don’t be,” I say. “It taught me something important.” “What’s that?” “Never make someone else the main character in your own story.”

I’m overcome with a sense of nostalgia. It reminds me so much of when our dreams still felt beautiful.

“Worse is loving someone who disappears and never knowing if they’ll come back. Because how do you move on if you’re not even sure they’re gone? The answer is—you don’t. When you spend most of your life chasing ghosts, eventually, you become one.”

I’m in love with this reckless, starry-eyed fool

Something toxic grew between us. I thought the drugs were your Kryptonite, Superman, but I’m beginning to think it might be me. Am I destroying your dream? Are you free-falling because you’re being weighed down by me? If I weren’t here, would you be soaring?

“He’s just an addict, and your daughter was his first high. That boy would’ve run right into traffic if she said she needed him to.”