I hold a ghost at night, my arms outlining your body, your bones that I will always remember feeling. I pretend the corner of your pillow is your shoulder, pressing it into my neck and telling it I love you and goodnight. Some nights, when it’s really bad, I call Bubbie or whisper for Dad, knowing neither of them will hear me that late. Then I cry, remembering the nights you crawled out of bed, having heard me from the other room. Baby, you’d say. It’s going to be okay. Everything passes. But this is everything, I think, no longer knowing what it passing would mean.
When Devan and I go back to school, I try to imagine you’ll be back home. I think I start to believe in a soul too, or something spiritual. Sometimes I speak to you in my head, as if you’re still with me. My brain thinks of systems that don’t exist, and I begin to understand the appeal of religion, the ease of it. I try to build my own, with requirements and practices too. You’ll only hear me, I think, if I call you by your full name. Or would it be your Korean name? Or maybe you’ll only see me when I’m on our couch, so I have to tell you about my whole day there. I think maybe these rules are my reluctance to believe you’re actually there, my hesitation not even fully realized, hidden within my effort to see you. I think of texting you, but don’t want to ruin the last pages of text messages we have either. I tell Dad I don’t know what to do. He says he doesn’t either. We hold each other, and I wonder if he pretends I’m you, too, as his tears fall into my hair.
It’s better for a little. I become too busy to cry, guilty for this but without time to feel the guilt. I tell myself I’m bringing you with me, but I don’t know if I am. I hold on to the last thing I want to remember you saying. You have to be open to it, okay? I’m going to fight so hard to stay with you guys. To see everything you do. I promise. I tell myself the truth, that the universe is so big, and if stars are out there, something as small as a single person can be too. I try to use logic to justify your existence, for some reason not allowing myself to just believe. I don’t know why I am unable to separate the possibility of your ghost from Christianity or Hinduism or Judaism or any other established religion. I don’t know why believing in one of them would upset me.
I think back to Baba and Dad, who have always said that after death, is nothing. I see Dad struggling to find you too, to rebuild his brain, to disown the absence he’s believed in his whole life. I think of you, who always said, until the last week, that you didn’t care what we did with your ashes, because dead people can’t feel. I think of the convenience in believing now, a convenience I can’t overlook but try to push aside. It works for some time. Over the next few weeks, I think I am able to feel you in my head and at home. I don’t know what I imagine you as, but I do believe in the possibility of you being here.
Then on my birthday I can’t find you. The system I crafted, the soul I invented, disappears and I sit in your bathroom alone, the mascara you bought me smeared on my palms. I open your phone to look at pictures, and see that Devan’s texted you. I’m 14. He says. Ella’s 16. I miss you. I look in the mirror and realize you will never know me at 16. I hold my cheeks and it occurs to me that just as I don’t look like my five-year-old self from your pictures, there will come a time when I no longer look like the version of me that you knew. I realize that maybe, in a few years from now, if you ran into me on the street, you wouldn’t know me. I cry that I will never run into you on the street. And then I can’t breathe and I can’t find the last video we took when you could still talk, and Dad is coming in the bathroom and I’m kicking my legs and it’s like I’ve remembered for the first time that you’re dead, like I’ve finally realized the definition of death.
I start seeing a therapist the week after that. She lives in California, so I see her on Zoom, her greenscreen filter displaying a Santa Barbara beach at sunrise. It reminds me of Moonlight beach in San Diego, the one we went to every summer. I ask her why it’s hard to remember you sometimes, to feel your presence or whatever it’s called. She tells me that sometimes our brains block out the good times, the times when it was easy, because it doesn’t hurt as much to miss something that wasn’t that good to begin with. I tell her I think I’ve blocked out the bad times too, and feel guilty again.
I do everything to feel better, except think about you. I stay up until two am, scrolling on TikTok or studying my body on Instagram, just to drag myself out of bed at six thirty the next day, and still end up late to school or wherever I need to be. I do just enough to keep an A in my classes, something you were always proud of me for and that prevents anyone from asking me what’s wrong. I sign up for activities I don’t have time for, volunteer to lead fundraisers or say I’ll submit my writing to places whose websites I haven’t even opened. I’m failing, I say, to friends, who ask what grade I really have. Dad can’t tell either. Your soul, spirit, “new form”, visits me less now too. I’ve lost faith, I think, in the religion you and I had. Christians are in the news for cutting cancer research, families are being removed from this nation under God, and kids are dying because they blame vaccines. It’s not connected, but I shame myself for creating an image of the supernatural, for believing in hopeful hallucinations instead of science.
One night though, I remember the worry fairy. I remember the way you used to take my hands, your thin, always-moisturized fingers wrapping around mine as you told me to pass my worries onto you. I remember the sound of your voice, the look of your eyes softly closed. As I remember, your soul returns, a ghost of some sort.
After that, I think I do start healing. I still don’t know if you’re here, but I get back the days when I feel less insane talking to you. I realize it one day, when I’m in the kitchen, listening to your playlist and “Sometimes” comes on, Britney Spears singing the lyrics we first read together in your room. I remember the exaggerated, dramatic, pained faces you made as you mouthed the chorus, and find myself making them too as I dance over a fried egg.
I cling to that song for the next month, repeating the chorus each night as I press your pillow into my shoulder, mouthing the words in the mirror as I get ready, knowing, somehow, that you’re watching too. It doesn’t last though. I think I can tell, the way I begin to force myself to go through the lyrics at night, added to my night routine as something I have to do, but don’t really believe in, like those years we tried to celebrate Hanukkah. So, same as the worry fairy, its effect wears off, and memories become hazy enough that any effort to speak to you feels forced, and within a month, useless. I think of telling Dad, your last text to me to ask others for help, because I used to only ask you. But one night, when we’re watching How I Met Your Mother, nearing the end, he hugs me from the side, smiling.
When I die, he tries to tell me. That’s not funny, I say. When I die, in a very very long time, I want you to place some of my ashes with hers, he says. And I think I see then, in the look on his face and in his words, that he no longer questions if there’s something after death. He finally believes that you’re here.
And so I smile back, that night returning to not crying until I know he’s asleep. I think I feel alone, him and you existing together in a world I have yet to have faith in.
Ella Upadhyay is a junior at Brookline High School. She’s a co-founder and editor-in-chief of World Insane Literary Magazine and loves writing short stories, baking, and spending time with her friends.