Ghost of You: The Haunting of Eternal Presence

There is a quiet place where memory and longing meet, a room beyond the noise where I can almost hear you again.

Not with my ears, but in the pause between breaths, in the wind carrying a phrase you once said, in the night returning the shape of your laughter.

You are gone from the chair, from the doorway, from the reach of my hands. I will not pretend death did not take something real.

Still, your presence has an afterlife in me: the kindness I learned from you, the song I cannot hear without turning toward the past, the way morning light finds the place you used to stand.

You are the ghost I sometimes welcome, not a spirit I can prove, but love continuing as memory. It walks beside me until the day asks me to walk alone again.

In prayer, I call this closeness the Beloved. I imagine God as the fabric holding what cannot be held.

Perhaps you are near. Perhaps only your influence remains. I can live inside that not-knowing and still feel grateful for the heartbeat your life once touched.