Ghost Girl and the Other Inconveniences of Being Alive

A micro-chapbook

I A Brief Report from the Scene of the Crime

. . .

1. The General Inconvenience of Being Alive

By Thursday morning, I had decided that life was becoming unnecessarily difficult.

I had no evidence that it had ever been easy. I suspected people who claimed otherwise were either lying or had someone who changed their bedsheets.

I woke up tired, which seemed unfair. I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour, performed no heroic labor, and spent most of the previous evening sitting down.

Nevertheless, I woke as though I had been working overnight at a factory that manufactured regret.

My back hurt. My face looked disappointed. I had seventeen things to do and no particular desire to do any of them.

I made coffee.

This did not solve my problems, but it gave them a little distance.

I sat at the kitchen table and considered the day ahead. There were practical matters, financial matters, personal matters, and the matter of whatever was happening to my hair.

I had recently begun to suspect that adulthood was not a destination but an administrative error from which nobody had thought to release me.

Somewhere along the way, I had expected to feel more certain. More established. More like a woman who knew what she was doing.

Instead, I was a woman with a calendar full of reminders to do things she did not want to do, including one reminder to drink more water.

I drank some water.

There. Progress.

I was not going to change my life before breakfast. I was not going to become radiant, disciplined, financially secure, and emotionally unbothered by lunchtime.

I was going to finish my coffee.

Then I was going to see what happened.

For now, this seemed a reasonable arrangement between myself and the universe, which had already demonstrated a troubling lack of respect for my schedule.

2. I Had Such Plans for Myself

When I was younger, I thought I would become someone.

I don’t mean famous, necessarily. I wasn’t asking for a statue or a documentary narrated by a serious British man.

I simply thought I would become a woman with a recognizable shape to her life.

She would know what she liked. She would have developed opinions about wine, perhaps, and own a proper coat. Her home would contain matching glasses. She would travel somewhere interesting without spending three weeks worrying about the cost.

She would have a particular way of walking into a room.

She would not have to look up how to remove a stain from a blouse while wearing the blouse.

I imagined her as a finished thing.

It never occurred to me that I might spend the rest of my life becoming, or that the becoming might look suspiciously like forgetting why I had entered the kitchen.

Sometimes I catch sight of myself in a shop window and feel a moment of recognition followed by mild concern.

There I am, apparently.

The woman I was on my way to becoming.

I want to ask her whether this was what she had in mind.

I want to apologize for some things and congratulate her on others.

Mostly, I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to hurry.

But she is already walking away, thinking about something she forgot to buy.

I suppose we have always been like this.

II THE MAINTENANCE OF A WOMAN

. . .

3. A Face Is a Full-Time Job

There is always something wrong with my face.

Not wrong in a medical sense. Wrong in the way a perfectly respectable house can become a project once someone shows you a photograph of a better one.

A little dryness. A little darkness beneath the eyes. A new line that seems to have appeared overnight, apparently while I was unconscious and therefore unable to defend myself.

I have creams for the morning and creams for the evening. I have products whose purposes I understand and products whose purposes I have forgotten but continue to use because they were expensive.

I have watched women on the internet explain how to look younger using seventeen steps and the expression of someone revealing classified information.

I have occasionally followed their advice.

I have also stood in front of the mirror holding a small bottle of serum and wondered when my face became a group project.

The thing is, I like beauty. I like lipstick, perfume, beautiful clothes, and the small pleasure of looking in the mirror and thinking, Yes. That will do.

I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

I simply resent the suggestion that every natural thing about a woman is a problem waiting for a purchase.

My face has carried me through years I don’t discuss with strangers. It has laughed at things I shouldn’t have found funny. It has cried in bathrooms, smiled when I was frightened, and looked perfectly normal on days when everything inside me was falling apart.

It seems ungrateful to complain about a few lines.

Still, I bought the moisturizer.

I am a complicated woman, not a saint.

4. The Body Has Filed a Complaint

My body and I have reached an impasse.

I ask it to do ordinary things. It responds with feedback.

I would like to sleep through the night.

It would like to discuss my lower back.

I would like to walk up a flight of stairs without noticing the existence of my knees.

My knees would like me to know that they have been here the entire time and would appreciate some acknowledgment.

I would like to wear something beautiful.

My body would like to be comfortable, warm, properly fed, and consulted before any decisions are made.

We are not communicating well.

There was a time when I treated my body as a vehicle for transporting my ambitions. I would get up, get dressed, go out, come home, and expect the machinery to continue operating without complaint.

Now it has begun sending invoices.

I am trying to be more respectful.

I stretch occasionally. I drink water. I purchase shoes that don’t seem designed by someone who has never encountered a human foot.

I try not to regard every change as a betrayal.

This last one is difficult.

A woman can know perfectly well that bodies change and still feel personally insulted when hers does.

I don’t have a revelation about this. I have a drawer full of clothes that fit differently than they used to and a growing appreciation for elastic waistbands.

Some days, that is the extent of my enlightenment.

Today, I am wearing something comfortable.

I would like that to count as progress.

5. The Beauty Industry Has My Number

I am beginning to suspect that the beauty industry knows me better than I know myself.

It knows I am vulnerable after midnight.

It knows I can be persuaded that a small glass bottle contains the possibility of a different personality.

It knows that if a product is described as restorative, age-defying, or luminous, I will at least consider whether I have been insufficiently restored, too defiant of age, or inadequately luminous.

I don’t even know what luminous means in a practical sense.

Can I pay a bill while luminous?

Will I still be luminous if I have to make three phone calls and sit on hold?

Can luminosity be maintained in fluorescent lighting?

I have questions.

I also have a perfume I love, a lipstick that makes me feel a little dangerous, and a ridiculous fondness for beautiful packaging.

I refuse to surrender these pleasures to the argument that women are manipulated by wanting to be beautiful.

Sometimes I want to be beautiful.

Sometimes I want to smell like a mysterious woman who has never misplaced a receipt.

Sometimes I want to buy something because it makes me happy, and I don’t want happiness to submit a written justification.

The problem is not that I enjoy beautiful things.

The problem is that I have been taught to believe they might repair me.

Nothing in a bottle can do that.

But a beautiful thing can make an ordinary Tuesday feel slightly more like mine.

I think there is a difference.

I am trying to remember it at the checkout.

III THE MODERN WORLD HAS MADE A MISTAKE

. . .

6. My Phone Is a Small, Glowing Emergency

I pick up my phone to check the time.

Twenty-seven minutes later, I know that a woman in another country has renovated a kitchen, a man has explained why everyone is wrong about happiness, and several strangers are furious about something I did not know had happened.

I have learned nothing useful.

I have also developed an opinion about a kitchen I will never see in person.

My coffee is cold.

This seems to be the defining experience of modern life: being continuously informed about things that have nothing to do with me while neglecting the things that are sitting directly in front of me.

I know what people ate for breakfast.

I know what they bought, where they went, what they wore, and what they believe a person should be doing by the age of forty, fifty, sixty, or whenever the next arbitrary deadline arrives.

I know how much better my life could be if I were more disciplined, more attractive, more organized, more adventurous, more financially literate, and in possession of a kitchen with a stone island.

I do not know where I put my glasses.

I turn off the screen.

The room becomes quiet, and I feel an immediate, unreasonable urge to check whether anything has happened.

This is how they get you.

I set the phone down and return to my coffee.

Nothing extraordinary happens.

No one announces that I have missed my moment. No opportunity arrives at the door and leaves because I was unavailable for thirty seconds.

The coffee remains cold.

I drink it anyway.

7. The Economy of Being Me

I have recently developed a relationship with my bank account that I can only describe as adversarial.

I check it with the wary concentration of a woman examining a suspicious package.

There are expenses I understand. There are expenses I remember making. And then there are small amounts that appear to have been extracted from my life by an invisible committee.

I am trying to be sensible.

I plan meals. I compare prices. I consider whether I truly need something before purchasing it.

Sometimes I decide I do.

Sometimes I stand in a shop holding a beautiful object and calculate how many ordinary things the money could buy instead.

Bread. Electricity. Something useful.

I put the object back.

I walk away feeling responsible, which is a very dull feeling to carry home.

Then I wonder when my life became a series of arguments against my own enjoyment.

I know money matters. I know that security is not imaginary and that wanting something doesn’t make it affordable.

I am not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I am tired of the way every pleasure seems to require a defense attorney.

Must everything be an investment? Must every hobby become a side hustle? Must every talent be monetized before it is allowed to exist?

I would like to do something badly and enjoy it.

I would like to buy flowers without treating them as a financial decision.

I would like to have enough money to feel safe and enough freedom to occasionally behave like a person rather than a cautious accountant assigned to the business of my own existence.

I look at my bank account again.

It has not become more sympathetic.

Neither, apparently, have I.

We shall continue negotiations.

8. I Am Tired of Being Optimized

Everywhere I look, someone is trying to improve me.

There are routines for mornings, routines for evenings, routines for skin, sleep, exercise, money, creativity, and the management of thoughts that have not been properly organized.

There are systems for becoming the best version of myself.

I would like to meet the current version first.

She seems to have been overlooked in all this planning.

I have downloaded applications to help me organize my life. I have made lists of lists. I have written ambitious schedules that assumed I could move from one task to another without experiencing hunger, distraction, discouragement, or the desire to lie down on the floor.

The schedules were beautiful.

I failed them by Tuesday.

Then I added failure to the list of things I needed to address.

This is the clever part of self-improvement: even your attempts to escape inadequacy can become evidence of it.

I don’t want to stop growing. I don’t want to abandon every ambition or spend the rest of my life wearing pajamas and declaring that nothing matters.

I would simply like to do something without asking whether it contributes to my personal development.

I want to read a book because the book interests me.

I want to walk because the air feels good.

I want to spend an afternoon doing something that will not improve my health, income, relationships, or future prospects.

I want to be allowed to exist without constantly turning myself into a project.

Today, I am not optimizing anything.

I am sitting down.

It is going badly.

I keep thinking of things I should be doing.

Still, I remain seated.

Perhaps this is how rebellion begins.

IV THINGS I CANNOT SEEM TO FIX

. . .

9. The Great Mystery of My Own Potential

I have a suspicion that I am not living up to my potential.

I have had this suspicion for years, which is impressive considering how little evidence I have collected.

Potential is a peculiar burden. It suggests that somewhere inside me there is a better, more accomplished, more interesting woman waiting to emerge, and that every day I fail to become her, I am wasting something.

I imagine her doing things.

Writing more. Traveling farther. Being braver. Making something that matters.

She probably wakes up early.

I resent her.

I resent that she exists as an idea rather than a person, and that she is somehow always available to judge me.

I have spent so much time worrying about what I might become that I have occasionally neglected the business of being what I am.

I write things down. I have notebooks. I have beginnings of stories and ideas that appear in the middle of ordinary afternoons and seem urgently important until I have to make dinner.

I have ambitions that don’t always survive contact with daily life.

I have also survived things I never included in my plans.

There is no column in the usual accounting of potential for the years you spent trying to keep going. No award for the days when you did what needed doing while feeling entirely unequal to the task.

Perhaps I have been measuring the wrong things.

Or perhaps I am simply trying to make myself feel better about not having written the great novel, learned Italian, or developed a reliable method for folding fitted sheets.

I cannot entirely rule that out.

I am still here, though.

I still have ideas.

I still want things.

Perhaps potential is not a debt I owe the future.

Perhaps it is simply the fact that something in me is not finished wanting to live.

I rather like that possibility.

I will probably overthink it tomorrow.

10. The Afternoon Went Missing

I had plans for the afternoon.

Nothing spectacular. I intended to answer a message, tidy the desk, read for an hour, and begin something I had been meaning to begin for several weeks.

I made coffee.

Then I looked at the weather.

Then I checked the news, which was a mistake.

Then I remembered an embarrassing thing I had said several years ago and spent an unreasonable amount of time revisiting it as though new evidence might emerge.

I opened a document.

I closed it.

I went to the kitchen.

I came back.

I checked the time.

The afternoon had disappeared.

I felt that familiar little panic, the one that arrives when you realize you have been alive for several hours without producing sufficient evidence of it.

I began to negotiate with the remaining day.

If I hurried, I could still accomplish two things. If I stopped thinking about the lost time, I might recover some of it. If I worked efficiently, I could perhaps rescue the evening.

I was preparing to turn the rest of my life into a punishment for having wasted an afternoon when I noticed the light on the wall.

It had moved while I was busy being disappointed in myself.

The room was quiet.

My coffee was cold again.

I stood by the window and watched the light fade.

I didn’t do anything important.

I didn’t recover the afternoon.

It was gone, and the world had not requested an explanation.

I am trying to learn that not every empty space needs to be filled, not every hour needs to justify itself, and not every day can be turned into a story about how I finally got my act together.

Some days pass.

Some days are difficult.

Some days I am simply a woman in a room, watching the light change, with no idea what comes next.

I would like to stop treating those days as evidence against me.

11. A Small Catalogue of Things I Am Tired Of

I am tired of pretending that everything is fine when I mean that everything is technically functioning.

I am tired of advice that assumes the problem is a failure of attitude.

I am tired of the expectation that women should be endlessly adaptable, as though flexibility were a natural resource that replenishes itself overnight.

I am tired of trying to look effortless.

I am tired of the word effortless.

I am tired of feeling guilty for resting and restless when I finally do.

I am tired of the idea that if I were only better organized, I would have enough time, money, energy, confidence, and inner peace to manage the consequences of being alive.

I am tired of turning every disappointment into a private investigation of my character.

I am tired of thinking I should be further along.

Further along toward what, exactly?

I have no map. I have no reliable timetable. I have several passwords that I cannot remember and a drawer full of things I bought because I was certain they would come in handy.

I have made mistakes.

I have changed my mind.

I have wanted things that turned out to be wrong for me, and I have been frightened by things that might have been good.

I have spent time trying to become the sort of woman who would never have to feel embarrassed by herself.

I would like to meet that woman and ask whether she is happy.

I suspect she would give me a very polished answer.

I would not believe her.

12. The Loneliness of Having to Be Your Own Person

There are days when I wish I could step outside myself for an hour.

Not disappear forever. Not die dramatically in a rainstorm. I am not asking for a gothic ending.

I would simply like to set down the business of being me.

The remembering. The deciding. The worrying about the future while attempting to enjoy the present. The endless private conversation about whether I am doing enough, wasting time, making a mistake, or missing something important.

I would like someone else to be responsible for my existence for a little while.

Someone competent.

Someone who knows where the paperwork is.

Someone who will make the decisions and tell me when to eat.

Unfortunately, I am both the person requiring care and the person responsible for providing it.

This arrangement seems badly designed.

I can be very good company for myself. I can make myself laugh. I can spend hours following a thought into strange territory and return with an idea that feels like a small treasure.

But there is a particular loneliness in being the only person who knows the full extent of your own interior life.

I know what I meant when I said I was fine.

I know which ambitions I quietly abandoned and which ones I still keep alive in secret.

I know the things I am frightened of admitting, even to myself.

I know how often I have been brave without calling it bravery because there was nobody there to name it.

Sometimes I wish someone could see all of that.

Then I remember how uncomfortable I am when anyone looks too closely.

I am not an easy woman to understand.

I am not always easy to be.

Still, I wish myself a little company.

I wish myself a little kindness.

I wish I could remember, on the days when I feel most alone, that I have not abandoned myself entirely.

I am still here.

Even now.

Especially now.

V SURVIVAL, MORE OR LESS

. . .

13. An Unreasonable Amount of Hope

I do not trust hope when it arrives wearing white linen and speaking in a gentle voice.

I prefer it slightly disheveled.

I prefer hope that has seen my bank balance, my unfinished work, the state of my kitchen, and the number of times I have announced that Monday will be different.

I prefer hope that knows I can be difficult to live with, particularly when I am hungry.

The grand kind of hope has always made me nervous. It expects transformation. It wants me to believe that everything will eventually make sense, that the difficult years were preparing me for something, that there is a reason for the things I have lost.

I don’t know about any of that.

Some things happen and remain terrible.

Some things never make sense.

Some years give you nothing you would willingly choose again.

I don’t need to turn all of it into a gift.

But I have noticed that hope can arrive in very small forms.

A sentence I want to write.

A morning when I wake up curious.

A beautiful smell drifting from my wrist while I stand in the kitchen.

The sudden desire to go somewhere I have never been.

The discovery that I am still capable of being surprised by the world, even after all the things I have learned to expect from it.

Hope, it turns out, does not always announce a better future.

Sometimes it is simply the refusal to become entirely indifferent to the possibility of one.

I can manage that.

Not every day.

But today, perhaps.

Today I would like to see what happens next.

14. A Reasonably Nice Coat

I own a dark coat that makes me feel more mysterious than I actually am.

I wear it when I want to appear like a woman who has somewhere interesting to go, even if I am only buying bread.

The coat has excellent pockets.

This is important because I carry a number of things that suggest I am preparing for a minor emergency: tissues, receipts, lip balm, a pen that may or may not work, and a shopping list whose purpose has been forgotten.

Sometimes I put on the coat and look in the mirror.

I like the woman looking back.

She seems composed. She seems to have opinions. She seems unlikely to spend twenty minutes rewriting a perfectly ordinary message because she is concerned that a full stop might sound hostile.

I know better.

But I like her anyway.

There is something to be said for the small costume changes that help us move through the world. The lipstick. The earrings. The perfume. The coat that gives us the feeling of being a person who could, under the right circumstances, manage almost anything.

I don’t mistake these things for a solution.

I know what happens when I take the coat off.

There I am again, with my unfinished thoughts and my ordinary fears.

Still, I think I am allowed a little theatre.

Life is difficult enough without insisting that I approach it dressed entirely as myself.

Sometimes I need a costume to get through the door.

Sometimes I need a little darkness, a little beauty, and a pocket large enough to hold my keys.

I put on the coat.

I go outside.

I don’t know where I am going yet.

This seems promising.