​Ghost

The world thinks it knows me, but it doesn’t. In reality, nobody knows me. Nobody ever could. I’m unknowable. There’s a general idea in the collective consciousness for what constitutes a human being. A name, a face, a personality. A soul. I have at least two out of four, but the latter of them alludes me to the point where I doubt the validity of their existence entirely, not just within my own confused, hellish life, but in the lives of all others, as well. A personality is just a collection of learned and inherited traits channeled into some kind of rigid identity. The soul is simply a wishful construct that adds value to the valueless. No, I am resigned to a name and a face to bear it and nothing more. A shell. A twisted fraud imitating the humanity surrounding me. A ghost.

I can’t say for sure if I was always like this, so lost and confused within myself. My mother would have you believe that I was a bright and happy child, a boy like any other, but she would be wrong. An actual person’s personality and a competent fraud’s facade are almost indistinguishable to the outside, especially to the ones who claim to know you most of all. Serial killers understand this all too well. I, however, am not a serial killer. Although I most certainly live my life like one, if you could even call it that. I’m no murderer, and I have little desire to become one, but my fakeness is complete, because, above all else, I have to stay hidden. Conspicuously concealed underneath the blanket of normalcy that I have cultivated for myself to deny the world the chance to glimpse even the slightest flicker of my internal hideousness. A monstrosity lurking beneath the mask which will surely be revealed soon enough.

–

I grew up in the small English town of Muntsy-Upon-Twine, a name that I’m sure some drunk must have uttered in the throes of a stupor that was then lazily put forth as the eternal title of the close-knit community of just two thousand residents of which I was still one, still living with my mother at the embarrassing age of twenty-four. The nest, it seemed, was not one so easily flown. It was just me and her in that tiny single-story cottage on the village outskirts. My mother was always something of a basketcase, hysterical, often flying into a melancholic fit at the slightest inconvenience or harsh word. I learned quickly enough to sacrifice any semblance of honesty in her presence in exchange for whatever I thought she might have wanted to hear, something that I’m sure she was aware of on some level and silently thankful for just the same. The truth, after all, isn’t for everyone. It’s only the burdened who truly carry that weight. The ones who are nothing, see everything, and I’ve always been nothing.

She came in through the front door as I was sitting at the small dining room table, eating cereal. The bowl of sugary brown shit floated before me in the sea of off-colour milk, the sight preferable to my mother’s presumably worried face as she started to talk at me, her pitch perpetually shrill. Her hands, almost always shaking.

“Mrs. Robinson cut in front of me in the queue again… I’m so sick of this…”

She was sick of a lot of things. Mrs. Robinson. Her anxiety medication. Once when she was drunk on white wine and doubling up on the meds she claimed to be sick of life itself, of the pointlessness of it. I never felt quite as close to her in my entire life as I did in that moment. Still, I said nothing. Where I should have bonded, and reciprocated her vulnerability with some of my own unending supply, I instead walked out of her room, into mine, and put my headphones on. I couldn’t hear her crying that way. She was still looking at me as I sat there, motionless, still immersed in the disgusting dance of the floating cereal. In an effort to pacify her and avoid a scene, I said:

“That’s out of order. Really. She should wait her turn like everyone else…”

“Right?” She beamed, her clearly bubbling emotions switching on a dime to some more positive and easier to deal with. “I might bring it up to Ahmed the next time I catch him alone when none of the fucking gossips can hear. If he doesn’t keep the order in that shop, it’ll all go to bedlam. Complete bedlam!”

“Yes,” I answered, finally summoning the energy required to pick up the spoon and finish the last of the bowl. With just the milk there, life suddenly seemed incredibly and undeniably empty. The decent odds that eating breakfast, perhaps second only to my nightly baths, would regularly be the high point of my day never failed to depress me. “Bedlam…”