I am a ghost. I don’t know if I was born this way, if I died when I was small, or if it happened later . . . . For a long time, those questions were important to me. But ghosts like me have existed in every culture and in every age. We existed when acknowledging our existence was punishable by death, we existed even when language didn’t have words to describe us. I’ve come to accept that, and stop my search for answers.
When I was born, the doctor took a cursory look at me and wrote alive on my birth certificate, and that was a mistake.
I grew up believing I was alive. My parents, and my brother, were convinced of it. There was no other way for me to be.
I saw ghosts on TV as I grew up. Ghouls who recaptured their bodies and lived in them. Sex workers that were living men’s punchlines. That film where the bad guy is a ghost, and he kills living people and skins them, trying to make a body for himself. It puts the lotion on its skin . . . . Objects of freak show laughter or terror, written by the living, for the living. About us, but not for us.
So I grew up repulsed by the images of ghosts and ghouls the world gave me to look at. I laughed at them, even if I didn’t know why. But the thing about people, about humans, is that we’re not meant to exist without bodies. Descartes may have vaingloriously declared I think, therefore I am, but he was wrong. Even our language knows it: Gut instinct; heartbroken; spineless; weak at the knees. Without body parts, I couldn’t feel anything. Just tides pulling me back out to sea. A constant fight for my footing on wet sand as waves pulled at me. I wanted to live, but sometimes, more than anything, I just wanted to stop drowning.
Eventually, I had to turn to face the sea.
I had destroyed everything, fighting it—my partner, my relationship, myself. I’d started standing on the beach but the tide kept coming and now the water was high enough to lap at my chin. It was either turn or drown.
Even then, I didn’t know I was a ghost. I had a mountain to climb before I realised the reason I could only feel despair and rage was that I didn’t have a body with which to feel anything else. It took me five years to climb. I had no idea what I was doing when I started, no map, no rope, nothing. Sometimes, the only solution is to put on the big girl pants and climb.
It was hard. Dead ends, wrong turns, falls, valleys of shadow and exposed sheer faces. And I had to do it all while still living the life I had fumbled together. Eat, work . . . well, that’s about it, really. I had no friends. Every social interaction held the secret terror of my ghostly nature being discovered. It was still secret even to myself.
Don’t try and climb the mountain in one step, I told myself whenever I paused for breath.
Well, I got to the top. I thought I’d find salvation there. You know, hope. Friends. Love. Acceptance. All that good stuff humans need to survive.
What I saw instead was a different version of me. One with rosy cheeks, an easy smile, light dancing in her eyes. “You’re a ghost,” she said.
“What?”
I looked down at my translucent hands, at my empty chest, my legs drifting like bedsheets, and suddenly felt the yawning tide inside myself. Felt it pulling at me. Silencing and drowning me.
She was right.
I am a ghost.
I’ll admit, I fought against it. After all, I wasn’t a sex worker or a serial killer skinning people to make a body for myself. I was “normal.”
Wasn’t I?
No.
And when I recognised that truth it felt almost like I could breathe.
So, I turned to the rosy-cheeked version of me and asked, “What now?”
Nothing but a deafening silence.
I wailed and I wandered. Alone and scared, I stumbled into a hidden valley, and at the end of a dark cave full of pitfalls and monsters I found a pair of doors carved out of shame. My doors.
I pushed them open and stepped in.
I knew my body was in the world, somewhere. Some small shard of divinity had manifested and told me, and I’d learned to listen while climbing that mountain. I couldn’t imagine being the bright shining creature from my visitation, but I could at least get out of the water. Feel something other than the constant tide dragging me out to oblivion. If I found my body, I could do that. I could feel something.
But when I stepped onto the trailhead beyond the doors, someone blocked the way. They didn’t notice me. Their face was a changing smudge above a suit that cost more than I make in a year. A rosette pinned to their chest shifted colours, and their podium sagged under dirty flags and microphones. They dwarfed me and, back turned, they leered into a pit below the podium. Down there, a forest burned. Tinder-dry bracken and a cultivated field browned under drought. Wicked flames and thick, smothering smoke. Famine. People cried out for help. The politician above them called out, “Vote for me and pay no attention to the flames!”
“The real problem,” they said, still blocking my way, “isn’t the fire but the ghosts. If we admit that they’re people, then what are you? If they’re not dead, how can you be alive? They want to destroy you.”
Most people were too busy fighting fires or praying for rain for their dusty fields to care. They wanted someone to put out the flames. They wanted to eat. But without the crises, no one would ask the politician for help. So they’d been turning a blind eye and obfuscating while disasters built for decades. The more desperate people are, the more they’re willing to give up. That’s just basic economics.
“We’re going to change the law,” the politician said. “No more ghosts. No more ghouls. We’ll close the loopholes and strangle them so tight in laws that they won’t be able to exist.”
Some people cheered. Enough to make me scared. What had I done? Why me? After all I’d done to accept who and what I was, why was I the villain? Maybe, like Dylan said, I was only a pawn in their game.
Some people picked up flaming briars and tossed them onto green patches of ground, warming their hands as the flames caught. Others patted them proudly on the back. Still others watched in horror.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me . . . .”
Eventually the politician turned and glanced down at me.
“I want my body back,” I said. I saw their lip curl in disgust. Maybe because I’d admitted I was a ghost. Maybe because I wasn’t rich like them. Maybe just because I had the audacity to talk to them.
“You’ll have to go around,” they said.
“But why can’t I—”
But they’d already turned back to the flaming forest in the pit. To the spreading drought outside it.
“If we talk to them, it’ll be the END of ALL that we are!” they called.
Some people cheered. Others screamed when the fire touched them. Someone threw a flaming log at me, then turned and boasted about what they’d done. A small group emerged from the flames, fleeing for their lives. They were set upon and beaten, the politician urging them on. The crowd turned to look at me and I hurried away, scared of the same fate.
It took a lot of searching to find a way around, but eventually I found a small door surrounded by workmen drilling and cutting and hammering, making it smaller. I joined the back of the line.
It was a very long line.
I’d never noticed the pain before.
It’s painful to be a ghost. A spirit yearns for a body. Like a body yearns to move its foot from under an anvil. I’d been so convinced I was alive, and so numb, that I’d never noticed my own suffering before. It had still been there, though. That constant being-dragged-out-to-sea feeling. But now for the first time in my life I knew who I was. And the more clearly I knew, the more I wanted my own body.
I’d never felt like I’d belonged with my family, and now I knew why. I’d been a ghost! I ducked out of line and ran excitedly to tell them. Finally, I could have the relationship with them that they thought they had with me. Seeing them wouldn’t fill me with anxiety. It wouldn’t feel like I was suffocating in the house where I grew up. Their mantras had always been: nothing is more important than family and we just want you to be happy and to thine own self be true. I could skip some of the line if I could cut through my old childhood home.
So, shitting bricks, I pushed open the door, walked inside, and told them.
“These are the things that bring me joy. I’m working on myself, on feeling better, on being happy and fulfilled. It would really help me if you would call me by my living name and treat me like I’m alive. That would really help. I want to be happy.”
“You’re pretending to be something you’re not,” my father said. Just as simple as that. “Stop all this, you already have a body. We made it for you, now stop taking it away from us.”
Shocked, shaking, stunned, I slowly backed away. The door remained ajar, my father’s words echoing in my ears. Echoing through the empty vessel I inhabited.
“What about us?” he called through the open door. “How about some familial loyalty?”
Slowly, I reached out and pulled the door shut.
I stumbled numbly back to the line.
As I stood in line, waiting, I listened to his voice echoing through me.
I recognised that voice. I knew it. The sound of waves washing up against the shore. The waves that had been trying to drown me my whole life.
I was very quiet, sitting with that realisation. Empty from the mass of it.
“I think I’m a ghost,” I told my doctor.
My hands and knees were still bruised from crawling through the tiny door. Covered in mud. My cheeks tear-stained from waiting. And the pain, like living under a jackhammer.
“A what?” the doctor asked. His unfocused eyes lingered in my general direction.
“A ghost,” I said. “I need my body.”
“Huh,” he said, as if he’d read about that somewhere but wasn’t paying attention.
“I need a piece of paper from you,” I said. He fiddled with something on his desk. “There’s another fucking queue I need to join, and I need that piece of paper before they’ll let me.”
“What . . . what piece of paper?” he asked, eyes sliding back off into the corner.
I’d talked to the other ghosts in the queue and I knew exactly what form I needed, what he needed to write on it, and where he needed to write it.
Perhaps for some people, being themselves is intuitive. You just wake up in the morning, expel the night gasses, pick up your phone and there you are. Being yourself. Some ghosts get that. Very, very few. It requires so many things to fall into place that the chances are vanishingly small. The rest of us fumble and fight and fuck up, making random movements and listening to the pain, seeing what makes it smaller. There’s solidarity in suffering, in fighting the same battles and feeling the same pain. For someone so habitually shy and scared, I was almost gregarious in the line.
So I took a deep breath, put on my big girl pants, and told the doctor exactly what he needed to do and how he needed to do it. He grumbled the whole time and gave me a look I had become familiar with. Suspicious and tired, as if my very existence was both a threat and an annoyance.
But I got my piece of paper. I got to join the second queue. I crawled through the second tiny, narrow door and into another doctor’s waiting room. He called me in.
This was a ghost doctor, a doctor for ghosts. He would be on my side.
“So, you think you’re a ghost?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, well, convince me,” he said. He leaned back and watched me carefully.
This wasn’t unexpected. But the problem was, there is an accepted idea of how a ghost should be. What they should have experienced, what feelings they should have felt, what they should have done to try and feel alive. If serial killers were the story of bad ghosts, by the time I got to that second office, there was a story of good ghosts, too.
And my story wasn’t the story of a good ghost. I hadn’t done any of the things a ‘real’ ghost had. I hadn’t always known. I’d just always hurt.
Seeing me a little lost, he threw me a bone.
“What I really want you to do,” he said, “is relive all of your past traumas about being a ghost.”
So I sat in his office and did just that.
With each word, the door to my pain creaked open further. I walked out deafened from the noise of it. But I had the piece of paper I needed to join the next queue.
The world was changing, and I was, too. When I was young, we put the fire out. It threatened to consume us all, so we gathered together in one long line of humanity, passing buckets from one set of hands to another until the burning pit was gone. I sang a song about it in school assembly. But now I stood in line and watched the fire spread, creeping out from the pit and closing in on everyone. When we pointed to it, the politician turned and pointed to . . . me. “They are aberrations! Unclean! They mean you harm and anything they say is poison. How can truth come from a mouth so monstrous?”
There was smoke everywhere, but I had my own things to worry about.
I still enjoyed talking to the other people in the line. Still got a sense of community, of solidarity, of not suffering alone. There were even people who had done their time in the lines, and were alive and living, and came back to talk and help and love. It was beautiful.
It didn’t last.
Other people came and stood near us. They were alive, and didn’t understand who we were, what we wanted, what we were about. They wanted to “understand”. So many of us had spent so long not understanding, ourselves, that we were happy to talk.
“But you’re dead,” they said, cutting us off.
“No, no we’re not dead—”
“You’re either alive or dead,” they said. “You can’t be somewhere in between. That’s just science.”
Some of us were scientists, and tried to explain that according to science the messy business of being alive is far too complicated to fit into binaries.
“Corrupted,” the others said. “Captured by the ghosts and forced to speak their words.”
“No, no,” we said together. “We don’t even have any clear clinical definition of being alive and dead—”
“I learnt what it was when I was four,” they said. “I know what it is.”
Behind them, I heard whispers. Cling to the world you knew when you were too young to know better.
We tried to tell them the world was a different place to the one they knew as children. That’s when the shoving started. And, when no one stopped them, the fists. And, when no one stopped them, the hobnailed boots. And, when no one stopped them, the bats and clubs.
I retreated back inside myself, became shy and silent again. I stood quietly in line and tried not to be noticed.
I got through the second door. Bruised, scratched, bloody. I had to take my voice out of the small box I’d locked it in. This doctor, this one would understand.
“I understand, I understand,” he said. “Hmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.”
I looked out the window. Even on a perfect day, so many contrails criss-crossed the sky above me. I wondered if I was being selfish. The world was burning and here I was, consumed by my own pain. I told myself that only compassion could save the world and I must start with myself.
I’m not sure I believed it. But I had to try.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Yes, of course. Well, what I need is for you to convince me you’re a ghost. If you could just relive your trauma for me . . . .”
Another piece of paper. Another queue.
The beatings continued, and they were different now.
They’re pack hunters, these people with their bats and clubs and boots. When one got tired, another took over, and we remained—beaten and beaten and beaten.
I don’t want to tell these people why they do what they do. But it’s not for survival. We just wanted them to leave us alone. But they hunted us all the same.
“They’re stealing children!” oversized shadows yelled, long fingers curling into cones to amplify their voices. “They’re an evil octopus, their sticky tendrils are in every organisation. Doctors, lawyers, schools, charities, banks. There’s a secret cabal of ghosts controlling everything. Indoctrinating people. Destroying you.”
Flames leapt up in their footprints.
They’re familiar, those words, those accusations. Hauntingly so.
And we tried to point it out, we tried to tell them that this was not the first time those words have been used to hurt people. We told them where it had led last time. But our voices were weak and tired. And the yelling was so very loud.
Over it all, the politicians continued shouting. “Cling to the world you knew when you were four!” they bellowed. “There is no fire! There are no flames, there’s no hunger. You’re hurting because of them.”
Seeing a way out, some crawled from the pit and joined the hunting packs. They were given money and attention and validation and love, just so long as they chased and mauled. “We must not let them take their bodies!” the looming shadows called. “It’ll be the end, the end of everything. They’re rapists, and they want to look like you, so you’re easier to hunt. They’ll kill you and take your skin to make a body for themselves. Look at them, look at them. How can you trust them?”
Soon, other voices joined in. Voices I’d always trusted to tell me the truth. They lied, and they had no interest in the truth or what we had to say for ourselves. Their voices filled the newspaper stands, the television, the Internet. The politician, seeing their opportunity, sloped over and learned those lines, learned how to repeat them.
“They are the only fire!” they howled, pointing at us.
I watched from the windows of another doctor’s office, not surprised when he said, “I need you to convince me, to relive your trauma. This will be the last time, I promise.”
I reached the top of the mountain three and a half years ago. Forty-two long months. It’s a long time to wait, when salvation is only just beyond your fingertips.
For a long time, society protected us. When the clubs came out and the beatings began in earnest, some protested. Demanded that they leave us alone. Then we appealed to higher powers to make them stop.
But the higher powers just shrugged their shoulders and turned away, disinterested.
Next, we tried to take the clubs away. And the people who wielded them had called on those same powers to get them back.
“You realise this is irreversible?” the doctor asked.
“Yeah,” I said, irritated. “That’s the point.”
“And it may not be the answer you’re looking for?”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve lived with this my whole life. Every time I’ve taken a step down this path, there is less pain. So, I’m going to keep walking it. I want the pain to stop now. It’s, it’s so bad I can’t even think. I need it to stop.”
I’d been warned about sounding too desperate. If the doctor thinks that you’re suffering, they’ll deny you your body. For your own good.
“The ghost pain,” I said, quickly clarifying. This was a lie, but by now I was so accustomed to saying the untrue, the expected thing, that I didn’t even notice. “The pain of being non-corporeal, you know? Not being able to pick anything up, not being able to feel anything. I’m lonely and I need to connect with people. I need to open up, stop being this tiny slither of something. I can’t open up when I’ve got nothing to open up with, right? So, I need my body. So I can feel things.”
He looked at me over his glasses.
Outside the window, the judge banged his gavel. The packs could keep beating us. They could use their fists and feet and clubs. But nothing metal. No bricks. Wooden clubs were okay.
The doctor gave me my last piece of paper.
The day after my forty-second birthday, I woke up in a hospital bed and took my first breath. I’d never dreamed breathing could feel like this.
It is a bloody and brutal operation to squeeze a ghost back into their body. I was on a morphine pump for the pain and I couldn’t move. I dozed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, a well-meaning nurse waking me every hour to check on me.
I spent that first night being fully human, amazed at the depth of what I could feel. The whole human experience suddenly opened up to me for the first time in my life.
That was almost five months ago, and I’m still getting used to being alive.
The hate is louder than ever and only getting louder. Everybody thinks they own my body. Everybody thinks they have more right to it than me. And the burning world is getting hotter and hotter, so they have to shout louder and louder to distract themselves from that.
But, for the first time in my life, I can fill my fleshy lungs with air, with enough air to breathe and tell them, No. This body is mine.
This life is mine. This time on our vanishingly improbable, tiny speck of light, floating in a vast, dark universe is mine.
This body is mine.