Ghost 19

by Simone St. James

I think we can all agree that the mechanics in my head are faulty. The propellers are intermittent, and there’s a leak in one of the fuel lines.”

When I think of going out there, I think that maybe none of it is real, except me. And then I think that perhaps all of it is real, except me, and that’s much worse.

I was starting to think that this tearstained monster—this woman of rages, of sobs, of hysterical laughter—was the real me, and that the woman I’d been for my first twenty-nine years was the fake, the imitation.

It is a bleak moment indeed when you realize that you don’t actually like yourself—that you’re the kind of person you wouldn’t want to be friends with. That you don’t know how you came to be that person, and you don’t know what to do about it.

I knew that kind of weeping. I’d cried like that—not just put out, or angry, but a storm of emotion let loose in an unstoppable wash. It had all the marks of a cry done in secret, let out in that judicious moment when no one can see, when no one will know. A cry done on schedule so that no one around you is inconvenienced and life can go on. I’d cried like that in dressing rooms and on the fire escape of the apartment I’d lived in with Henry. All over America, women cry like that in toilets, in their cars, and on their back stoops every day.