The Trick of the Ghost, Natalie Gildea ‘23

The Trick of the Ghost

This ghost, yours truly, has been ghosted. Abandoned. That girl, she’s managed to get away—was I the one who let her fade? The haunted has hidden, and now I, the poor haunter, have no place to stay. How does a shadow scamper away like that? That was her secret: she could let the past dissipate, in a moment, into midnight mist.

But the fog was thick when we met. When I was seeking flesh and bones to build a semblance of myself, when the clouds around me obscured any image of my identity. The fog happened to fade when I saw her face, and it was just like I had wiped the mist from the bathroom mirror on a frigid morning. For a minute I was envious—she had my hair! My smile! My slightly pointed ears, my long legs, my awkward posture! She’d stolen it all, and I wanted it back.

So, in a moment of madness, I stole her shadow. And the haunting began.

Despite common belief, shadows are not bound to their human masters—rather, they are firstrate items for a ghost to purloin. The difficulty lies in finding the right shadow to occupy, which can take some time: all ghosts recognize who they were and who they should be, intuitively. That is what distinguishes them from others—not necessarily the lack of a physical form, but the perfect vision of one. The assurance in appearance that would take a human centuries to attain. So the trick of a lifetime presented itself when I saw her—strangely, the only treat in my ghostly existence. I had found my form to fit for eternity, and I only had one obstacle that hindered my mission.

She had to be alone and statue-still. The only way I could secure the links between the shadow and myself, lock the bonds between darkness and disembodied soul was if the actual body was unmoving, unaffected by others.

That girl, she had to stop glancing around, as if she were being followed! She was the only soul on this lonely rooftop, and both of us knew it. Nobody here. I was the only one lurking in the fog (and back then, I was nobody).

She had to fix her eyes on something—stop the sheepish glances, the ever-turning head! An airplane soared above and she looked up to gaze at the stars, those lonely comforts in the unknown and gaping abyss of night. This was when the roles switched and I became the shadow; the shadow became her master. This was the moment I tied the knot. This was when we learned what it feels like to haunt, to be haunted.

People had been looking at me funny for months. Maybe it was years—I can’t remember. The oddly sympathetic eyes of a teacher, my eight-year-old cousins turning their faces when I addressed them, the aunts and uncles who seemed to squint and scrunch their eyebrows. They had always looked at me funny, though—tilted their heads in a patronizing way when I asked questions, or subtly took steps closer as I spoke. But after the night I went to the roof, the whole world took a step back. And that was probably what shifted everyone’s vision.

It was the first night I had ever been completely alone, the possibilities limitless.

Climbing to the rooftop was my vision of what a really self-assured person, someone really rebellious, would do—and that “somebody else” was who I thought I was. The vision was logical; I would ditch my ingratiating little smile for a night and start glaring. But that old skin was tough to shed. I had grown into it too much, and heaps of old paranoia kept pushing deeper into my stiff, obedient skeleton.

Then I looked at the stars, and they took hold of me somehow. Pulled me out of my skin — something had to have shifted up there. The next day I was living the person I had always wanted to be, outwardly.

It was the only time I wasn’t tossed around by the decisions and collisions of those around me. I started taking the long winding back-roads back home, riddled with bumps and hideous curves that my family deemed unsafe to brave. I liked the wind in my hair there and the freedom of it all. It was the only time I was my own master, when they changed their ways for me.

Then there was some rush of feeling in me that transcended this new person. Some cosmic force, some inner tidal wave crashed as I looked up one day and saw a shape of light passing through clouds that looked so lonely—so much like myself. I felt a pang of sympathy for that image, and that was what broke my new skin.

It was that pang of guilt at betraying that sweet little smile. My few months of freedom became a memory in a minute—all behind me now, a shadow.

I took the safe way home that day. I thought I could find myself there.

The trick of being a ghost lies not in finding your shadow, but rather living in it.

This is the part in which I failed in my phantom pilfering. The two of us simply could not live together—because there were always two of us, always divided. She shifted one way where my soul told me to push back; I tried to blossom and she was dragging me down, down into some looming sense of danger.

I gave a gentle tug in the wrong direction that day, when she found her lonely cloud. It was somehow enough to drag her overboard, into the tides of desperation for the past, of something too foreign for me to grasp. My soul bent at every end but could not mold itself to those waves; crashing, rolling, crying. And now I stand stranded. So let the past dissipate—let the memory of haunting, of being haunted, fade into midnight shadow.

Natalie Gildea ‘23