She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

Tempted to send an emoji back, I toss the phone aside. She talks to me as if we’re friends already. Familiar. Warm. She’s probably that way with everyone, so this isn’t special.

This woman has her PhD in colonization, and I’m supposed to mindlessly defer to her?

Me, wishing she’d tell me the pain will go away. Her, telling me I’m grown in ways that need to be guarded. It doesn’t matter, in the end, who’s opened who—just that you’re a girl and no one should touch you. I want my sister to stay unafraid of herself and savor the power in that.

Every good thing happens in a flash. Ba holding my hand at the park. Me carrying Bren for the first time. Mom singing a lullaby to Lily in the hammock while I watch, my head on her lap. My brain’s wired this way—fleeting happiness and snagging anxiety.

I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I do have a penchant for sweet people. It’s a little bit like: Halle was the pastry to my black coffee or Lily is a butter cookie to my matcha. Yin and yang,

I stop by the altar, a haven where my worries can be put aside or, rather, put forward. I speak my mind and throw anxieties to one place. Incense calms me in a way smoking doesn’t; I’ve tried a few times. It isn’t spiritual, not in the same way other people burn incense for the dead to feed them or to honor their religion. Standing there I can suspend the belief that no one is listening. It’s probably selfish to use the altar as therapy, but I pretend incense can burn unwanted thoughts down.

She had the graceful showmanship of someone who knew my deepest secrets. I’d been scared, but enthralled too.

Are you going to stand there and cry, says the cruel thing that torments me by replaying moments that hurt. I’ll grind my teeth into dust before I give either the satisfaction.

Silence is the absence of sound other than itself—penetrating, filling, clawing its way through your ears. Silence is the worst sound of all, I’m beginning to realize.

The bar is low when someone tells you they’re kidding about you looking like shit and smelling, and your stomach does a flop.

The pull returns in my chest. Hope, longing for all the things I’ve already sworn off. This is why I need these acts of defiance, little hauntings that echo all that’s happened. Ba can’t be trusted. My heart snaps in half, as quickly as a cheap diary lock.

I wonder which has more heat: a ghost or its fresh corpse.

“Just because you feel lucky to be alive and fed doesn’t mean you can’t be angry.”

It feeds my anxiety, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? Sometimes, you can’t stop yourself. Sometimes, there might actually be something for you to be worried about.

I’m lost for words over the million little ways we can still hurt for family we hardly know.

Mom doesn’t want a new house. She wants the one she left behind as an eight-year-old girl. She wants nostalgia. In my family, I’m not the only one chasing after ghosts.

When I’m scared, my mom is still the person I want in the corner with me.

College, even a year late, will be my new life. Beyond all of this, I get to live in a dorm with other people. Meet new people. Meet people like me. Friends who I’ll learn to never let go of.

His large brown hands wrap mine, and I am his child again, in the safety of his arms.