Dancing with ghosts
1190 Words
Grief doesn’t knock when it enters.
It doesn’t announce itself or wait for permission.
It just...moves in.
After my mother’s death, grief became my roommate. It slept next to me in bed, sat silently across from me during meals I barely touched, and whispered strange lullabies into my ears at night.
Some days, I couldn’t get out of bed. Not because my body was tired—but because there was no point. What was I getting up for? For silence? For reminders? For the pain that met me at the bathroom mirror?
I remember once spending three straight days in the same clothes. I didn’t notice the smell. I didn’t care. My hair tangled into knots. The curtains stayed drawn. The world outside moved on, like it always does—but I remained frozen in the moment my mother died. That moment played on a loop in my mind like a cruel, never-ending song.
The voices came during those early weeks. Not hallucinations—but memories with sharp teeth.
“Faustina, tidy your room!”
“You forgot your lunch again, stubborn girl.”
“God gives His strongest battles to His toughest soldiers.”
Her voice haunted the air, sometimes coming from nowhere, sometimes woven into the wind.
I would turn suddenly, convinced I saw the hem of her dress vanish down the hallway. I would reach for my phone, momentarily forgetting she would never answer again.
I was losing my grip on reality.
People came to check on me during the first week. A few relatives, a neighbor from two houses down, one of my mother’s old colleagues who smelled of lavender and pity.
They all said the same things:
“You have to be strong.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“She’s in a better place.”
Empty words. Beautiful lies. They might’ve been comforting to someone else—but not to me. I didn’t want her in a better place. I wanted her here. With me. Alive. Laughing at my clumsiness. Hugging me when the world felt too heavy.
By the second week, the visits stopped. Life resumed—for everyone but me.
I tried to find refuge in my brother, Damian. But we were grieving differently. Where I wept loudly and collapsed into grief, he built walls around his pain. He returned to work three days after the funeral, barely said ten words to me, and kept himself locked in his room on weekends.
We were in the same house, but worlds apart.
One day, I knocked on his door just to ask how he was doing. He opened it slightly and looked at me like I was a stranger.
“I’m fine, Faustina,” he said. His voice was calm, but his eyes were tired—like he hadn’t slept in weeks.
I wanted to say, "I’m not fine. Can you not see that? Can you please hold me just once without pretending everything’s okay?"
But the words never left my lips. They just sat there, trapped behind my throat like every other unsaid thing in our house.
A month passed. Then two. I lost all sense of time.
My savings were running low. I hadn’t worked since graduation, and now I had no one to lean on. I sold a few of my mother’s clothes—quietly, guiltily—just to pay for food.
I applied for jobs half-heartedly. Mostly entry-level administrative roles, nothing tied to the dreams I once had of writing or public relations. I didn’t have the strength to be creative. I didn’t even believe I had anything to offer the world anymore.
At night, I’d lay in bed and stare at the ceiling. My thoughts were not always kind.
Sometimes, I wondered if dying might be easier than living through this constant ache.
But then, a tiny voice—maybe my mother's, maybe my own—would whisper:
“Not yet, Faustina. Not like this.”
Grief changed how I saw everything.
The streets I once strolled felt colder. The sky less blue. Even food tasted different—like my taste buds had died along with my joy.
I lost weight. I lost interest. I lost myself.
I couldn’t bring myself to go back to church. Not after everything. Not after my father’s loyalty to that very place led to his slow, silent destruction. Not after my mother, who believed so fiercely in God’s timing, was taken from me without a single warning.
What was faith, if it only led to heartbreak?
I stopped praying. I even tore my rosary once during a particularly bad night. It was a moment of rage—tears and screams and questions hurled into the dark like knives:
“Why would You take her?”
“Why always me?”
“What have I done to deserve this?”
There were no answers.
Only silence.
Only the echo of my own pain.
One rainy afternoon in July, I found myself walking—no destination in mind, no umbrella, just walking.
I ended up near the park my mother used to take me to as a child. I sat on a bench soaked in water, letting the rain drench me completely. I didn’t care. The cold was a welcome distraction from the fire in my chest.
Across from me, a little girl laughed as she jumped into a puddle, her mother scolding her gently. I watched them, numb. The scene felt like it belonged to another world. A world I used to live in but could never return to.
That’s when the thought came: Maybe I had died too—and no one had buried me yet.
That night, something inside me shifted. Just slightly. Like a c***k forming in a wall that had held too much pressure for too long.
I went home and opened a box of my old journals—the ones I had stopped writing in during my university days. I flipped through them, reading entries written by a much younger, more hopeful version of myself. A girl who believed in miracles. A girl who still thought she’d become a bestselling author someday. A girl who believed her life had meaning.
That girl felt like a stranger now. But she still lived in me—somewhere, barely breathing.
And for the first time in weeks, I picked up a pen.
I didn’t know what I was going to write. I just let the ink bleed onto the page.
“I don’t know who I am anymore. But I am still here. Still breathing. And maybe—just maybe—that counts for something.”
I cried after that. But it wasn’t the same kind of crying.
This time, the tears felt like release.
Like I was letting go—not of my mother, but of the pain that kept me from remembering her in joy.
That night, I fell asleep without nightmares.
And in the quiet darkness, the shadows around me didn’t feel as loud.
They were still there.
But so was I.
Still here.
Still breathing.
Still—somehow—dancing, even if it was with ghosts.
- Writer
