The house had been mine once, a warm, bustling place filled with laughter, the smell of baking bread, and the golden light of afternoons spent reading by the window. Now, it stands like a hollowed shell, a relic of time forgotten, perched at the edge of the woods as though the land itself seeks to reclaim it. It has been years—decades? Centuries? I cannot be sure anymore—since I last felt the comforting weight of time. The living often speak of eternity as though it’s a gift, but I know its curse.
The first few years after my death were an exercise in denial. I lingered in familiar rooms, hoping the creak of floorboards beneath my spectral form might trick me into believing I was still alive. But the world moved on. Furniture disappeared, replaced with newer, uglier pieces. Faces I loved vanished, replaced by strangers who didn’t know my name or care about the story of my life.
At first, I tried to communicate. I whispered their names, reached for their hands, and watched in dismay as they shuddered and called it a draft. It wasn’t long before frustration curdled into mischief. If they wouldn’t notice me when I was kind, perhaps they’d notice me when I wasn’t.
I started small. A candle knocked over here, a picture frame askew there. The living are quick to find excuses for the inexplicable. Wind, they said. Gravity. One tenant even had the audacity to blame their cat for the mysterious footsteps in the hall. I grew bolder. Books tumbled from shelves. Shadows flitted across walls. I delighted in their gasps, their stammered prayers to gods who wouldn’t answer.
Still, it wasn’t enough. Fear might make them notice me, but it didn’t make them stay. One by one, they packed up their lives and left, blaming the "creepy vibe" or the "weird noises at night."
Years bled into one another. The house grew quieter. Dust gathered like a shroud over the furniture, and ivy clawed its way up the walls, as though the forest sought to reclaim what humanity had abandoned. I hated the silence more than I’d hated their indifference.
Then came the girl.
She arrived on a rainy October afternoon, dragging a battered suitcase behind her. There was something about her—a shadow in her eyes, a heaviness to her steps—that told me she wasn’t like the others. She didn’t scream when the front door creaked open on its own. She didn’t flinch when the chandelier swayed in the absence of wind. Instead, she stood in the center of the foyer, her damp hair plastered to her face, and whispered, “I’m not afraid of you.”
I didn’t know what to make of her. Most tenants spent their first few days trying to pretend the house was normal, convincing themselves that they hadn’t made a mistake. This girl did the opposite. She wandered the halls as though she were searching for me. She left offerings—flowers on the mantel, small trinkets on the stairs—and spoke to the empty rooms as though expecting an answer.
“Are you lonely?” she asked one night, her voice soft in the darkness. I had been lingering by the window, watching her through the veil of my existence. I didn’t expect her to hear me—or maybe she couldn’t. Maybe the question wasn’t for me at all.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I felt something stir in the hollow where my heart had been. Yes, I wanted to tell her. Yes, I am lonely. But I didn’t. Instead, I reached out with the smallest fragment of myself, just enough to make the curtain beside her flutter. She smiled, and for a fleeting moment, I felt alive again.
Over the weeks, we developed an unspoken rhythm. She talked, and I listened. She left gifts, and I made my presence known. She told me about her life—how she’d come to the house seeking solitude after the death of her mother, how the weight of grief had driven her away from the city and its constant noise. “I thought being alone would help,” she confessed one night, “but it just makes me realize how much I miss her.”
I understood her pain in a way no one else could. I, too, had known loss. I, too, had been swallowed by it. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her that she wasn’t truly alone, but my voice had long since been lost to the void.
One evening, as she sat by the fireplace, she pulled a notebook from her bag and began to write. I watched as words flowed from her pen, spilling across the page like an unraveling thread. She wrote of the house, of its creaking floors and drafty halls. She wrote of me—not as a monster, but as a presence, a companion. “The ghost doesn’t scare me,” she wrote. “If anything, it feels like we’re kindred spirits.”
The words warmed something deep within me, something I had forgotten could still exist. Kindred spirits. Is that what we were?
As the months passed, the house began to change. She cleaned away the cobwebs and repaired the broken windows. She filled the rooms with light and life, her laughter echoing through the halls in a way that felt achingly familiar. For the first time in years, I felt as though the house was alive again—not just a building, but a home.
But I knew it couldn’t last. The living are not meant to linger in the shadow of death. One day, she would leave, just as the others had. The thought terrified me, not because of the loneliness it promised, but because of the emptiness she would leave behind.
It happened on a bright spring morning. She stood in the doorway, her suitcase by her side, and gazed at the house one last time. “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of a thousand unsaid words.
And then she was gone.
The house is quiet again now, but it no longer feels empty. Her presence lingers in the freshly painted walls, in the repaired staircase, in the echoes of her laughter that refuse to fade. I find myself waiting—not for her return, but for someone like her. Someone who will see me not as a specter to fear, but as a soul seeking connection.
Until then, I remain. Watching. Waiting. Hoping.
After all, eternity is a long time to be alone.