Ghost 19

by Simone St. James

He’s nice, she’d said. He offered. I have to. I didn’t blame her. A girl has to do what a girl has to do.

I knew a rented place when I saw one, and no one had stayed long enough at 19 Howard Avenue to frame their own photographs or sew their own insufferable embroidery. It didn’t cross my mind to wonder why.

home-wreckers were my particular genius.

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.”

he was trying to prove I was crazy, which was not in dispute.

In her mind, my breakdown put paid to my sinful ways, an easy balance that finally made the world right again.

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.