We all carry parts of ourselves that we hesitate to reveal—the strange, the sad, and the inexplicable. This piece is an unfiltered look into those corners of my mind, an attempt to put words to emotions that often feel like they defy explanation. It is a confession, an observation, a quiet revelation of the things I wish I could say out loud but never do. If you’ve ever felt like a ghost in your own story, like your thoughts don’t quite fit into the world around you, maybe you’ll find a reflection of yourself here. Maybe, in reading this, you’ll feel a little less alone.

---

One Day, I Want to Be Able to Tell You That—

That I’m a little crazy. Not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that loops the same song until it carves itself into my bones until the very first note makes me sick until I swear I’ll never listen to it again—but I know I will. Eventually. When the memory dulls.

There’s a sadness in me, circulating like blood, ebbing and flowing with the moon. It is a fact, like gravity or the sky shifting colours. And it won’t change, not even if I fall in love. I think in poetry, which means I rarely say what I mean, and my thoughts scatter like ink smudged by careless hands—only coherent when someone takes the time to read between the lines.

Beautiful things ruin me. Sunsets, poetry, the way laughter lingers in empty rooms. And I don’t think that’s a good thing. I try not to cry because I fear if I start, I won’t stop. That the world will dismiss me with a sigh, that no one will believe my sadness is real.

Of all the boys I’ve whispered ‘I love you’ to, I think I only ever meant it once. But then again, what did 17—or even 21—really know about love? I didn’t lie to them for their sake. I lied to myself. Hoping that maybe if I said it enough times, I would learn what it meant, what it felt like, and what made it different from the ache of wanting to be wanted.

Some days, I wonder what’s wrong with me. On other days, I don’t care enough to find out. If I could be anything other than human, I’d be a ghost—so I could disappear when I wanted. But also, if I’m doomed to be lonely, I might as well haunt a few people.

I have a list. A few I’d want to torment for sport, and a few I’d simply want to sit beside, silent and unseen. Maybe I’d watch them from across a room, memorizing the way their hands move, the way their lips curve into half-smiles. Maybe I’d stare too long, and maybe that makes me slightly unhinged. But I just want to be near them. To exist in the periphery of something beautiful.

I wonder if ghosts get tired. If they ever wish to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be pulled out of the mist of their own making. I wonder if they get lonely, drifting between worlds, attached to things that no longer belong to them. Maybe that’s why they haunt, why they linger—because even in death, they can’t let go.

I have never been good at letting go. I clutch onto things, onto people, onto feelings that should have faded long ago. I replay conversations in my head, rewrite endings, and wish for different beginnings. I romanticize pain in a way that is probably unhealthy, but it makes everything feel less mundane.

Ah… maybe I am crazy. But maybe, just maybe, I’m okay with that.