Ghosts

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Some things leave your life before they leave you.

There are people you stop speaking to whose voices you can still hear. You know what they would say about something. You catch yourself preparing to tell them a story. For a moment, the distance between then and now disappears. Then you remember why the conversation will never happen.

That is where “Ghosts” takes my thoughts.

I think about everything a person can carry into an ordinary day without anyone noticing. You answer the question. Finish the work. Help someone else find their way through a problem. Meanwhile, a memory has been sitting beside you since morning, brought back by a sound, a familiar expression or something you weren’t looking for.

Being able to function tells people very little about what it costs you.

I know the part of myself that keeps going. The part that wants to understand, find an answer and make something better. That determination has helped me through a great deal. It can also keep me circling something long after there is anything left to solve.

You revisit the conversation. Give someone’s words another meaning. Consider what you might have said differently. Somewhere in that effort is the hope that understanding the ending thoroughly enough will change how it feels.

Sometimes the facts become clearer while the ache stays exactly where it was.

The hardest ghosts can be the versions of ourselves attached to those memories. The man who trusted without hesitation. The one who believed there would be more time. The one who could picture a future so clearly that losing it felt like losing somewhere he had already lived.

There is grief in realizing how much you arranged your life around something that never came to be.

And there is a difficult kind of honesty in admitting that you miss parts of it. Even when leaving was necessary. Even when you would make the same decision again. You can remember tenderness accurately without forgetting what hurt you.

I want to give my own history that much honesty.

Music makes room for feelings I can usually keep occupied. A voice carries the strain for a few minutes. The weight has somewhere to go. I can sit with something unfinished without immediately turning it into another problem I’m responsible for fixing.

That is why I would return to this song.

I don’t expect every old hurt to become a lesson. Some things were painful, and I would have chosen differently if life had given me that choice. I can acknowledge what they took without spending every remaining year trying to get it back.

There are people in my life now who deserve my attention. There are songs I haven’t written. There are ordinary evenings I want to experience without being somewhere else in my head.

The past will probably find me again.

When it does, I want to remember that I have a life here, too.

— Weathered Voice