Written by Erica Cousins
She stares into my room, but she never looks at anything but me. I hold her gaze, hold it tight, like a kid holds their pocket money; pound coins desperately wedged into the creases of clammy palms. I’m gripped by a fear that the minute I break eye contact she’ll slip away and won’t come back.
She came for the first time years ago, when finally my features had set in what had previously been the malleable, youthful form of my face. I felt time flatten and stretch in that moment, running its threads around me. My head span, snatching short, hopeless breaths of air that seemed to be empty of any oxygen. A face I didn’t think I’d see again furrowed its brow and I recognised the look in her eyes, gentle and understanding, behind a sheen of welling tears.
With each new crease in the corners of my eyes, each new streak of grey in my hair, she comes to inspect how my body is yielding to time. I know she will yield too, when one day experience etches itself too firmly into my face, more firmly than it ever had the chance to take hold of hers, and she’ll be forced to retreat back into memory.
Long before my life splintered, when I was still a child, ghosts tormented me relentlessly. I would lay awake at night, trying not to notice the shadows swirling in the corners of my room, usually buckling under my fear and calling for her to come and check there was no one there, to smooth my hair back from my forehead and tell me I was safe. To give me that gentle look that soothed me instantly. I feared they would hurt me, possess my body or fill my mind with terrors. I know now, that’s not how ghosts hurt you. They take your life as it is, as it was, and how it could have been, and they ball them all up like coloured clay, blending the edges of each into the next. They draw grief out of you like blood running from tear ducts, rushing for any possible exit. Worst of all, they nestle themselves into the smallest crevices of your life. In features that mature into familiarity, in tables laid to fit one more person than they should, in forgotten boxes of stuff that sit waiting to be absent mindedly rummaged through.
Some days I put my fingers to the glass to trace the straight nose, the full cheeks, and she reaches back to me. Some days I want to take the mirror and hurl it at my bedroom wall, to crush the shards into powder and hide myself from her. I turn out the light, point my eyes at the scuffed floorboards, but I long for her to still be there when I look back. I want to embrace her and I want to run from her; I can do nothing but watch her watching me.
