image: Emin Açıkgöz (Pexels)
There’s a loud silence in the loss of anticipation of your favorite things. I am learning that silence is a signal that the house you once resided in is haunted, and it’s time to go.
When I was in my last semester of my first go-round of college, I took a film class. The final project was to make a short film. I don’t exactly remember the exact criteria, but I do remember the plot I created and never fully executed (keep this in mind).
Heavily influenced by Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” music video, my plot centered on a main character who lived in her own little world surrounded by the unfilled walls of her dingy apartment. In the middle of the night, she would be jolted awake by the clanking of a sheet-stirring ghost with funny glasses and an appetite for pure chaos. The ghost urged her to drink away her sorrows and embrace a defeated mindset, leading to her isolation as merely a painting on the wall of her vast apartment. The final shot was intended to show the main character resting her head on the shoulder of the sheet ghost, creating a sense of comfort in the chaos. However, as she sits on the sheet, the ghost stands up, revealing that the "ghost" was actually the main character all along.
Everyone has ghosts. Or “skeletons in the closet” or “dirty laundry”. They take form in all kinds of things, and in my opinion, come out to haunt in the most inconvenient times.
Tomorrow is my absolute favorite day of the year, and for the first time in 21 years, I have not a single plan, activity, or way to participate. I don’t have a carefully curated and niche costume, or some staged Instagram post going out. There’s no agenda of bars to hop, or a “Happy Birthday, Ava” pregame. In fact, the only jot on my schedule is a serving shift.
I could continue to wallow in the discomfort of this longing for excitement that this void leaves me, as I kind of admittedly have been all week. Or I could somewhat force myself to look at it from the differing angle that is: I have outgrown, and I am becoming.
And my mother’s take on all of this is, “That feeling is just a part of growing up.”
Maybe that’s all it is. Not necessarily losing the things you love, but realizing that the way you once loved them doesn’t quite fit with who you are anymore. There is a strange kind of grief in that. Especially when you can remember a version of yourself who would have counted down the days, planned every single detail, and found a reason to make an ordinary Saturday feel like the biggest day of the year.
I think we spend so much of our lives trying to preserve the people we used to be. We revisit old habits, old places, old people, and old versions of ourselves in hopes of feeling something familiar. We romanticize the past until we forget that there was a reason we left certain parts of it behind.
And sometimes, without even realizing it, we start decorating the haunted house in cheap decor instead of leaving it.
We give our ghosts names. We make room for them at our dinner tables, serving them food that WE paid for. We let them convince us that their presence is just another part of being human. Before long, we don’t even recognize the difference between the things that make us who we are and the things that are keeping us from becoming.
I think that’s where I am right now, admittedly. Somewhere between missing the girl who made everything an occasion and learning to appreciate the woman who maybe doesn’t need one. I’m still figuring out how to sit with the quiet without immediately interpreting it as something missing. How to be excited about what is coming without desperately trying to recreate what has already been.
Maybe I’ll just go to work, come home, and let October 31st come and go without trying to make it anything more than what it is. And I am sure, without a doubt, my fiancé and I will binge scary movies until late hours over FaceTime.
And maybe that’s okay, because the next morning, I will be 22. I’ll have a whole new year filled with new traditions and opportunities for growth, and gosh is that worth celebrating!
I don’t think the goal is to become someone who never looks back. I think it’s to learn when looking back starts keeping you from moving forward.
I never finished that short film, and I think, in a way, that’s kind of poetic. But I think I finally understand how I wanted it to end.
The scariest part was never the ghost. It was the realization that the main character had been keeping it company all along. And eventually, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep sitting beside it or have the guts to get up and leave.
Some houses are haunted because we refuse to let their occupants go. Others are haunted because we refuse to leave ourselves.
Either way, there’s a door.
