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I’m haunted. Every morning I see a ghost in the mirror. She appears a little to the left of my own reflection. At first, I think it’s a trick of the of the harsh fluorescent bathroom lights. Then I see her face. It’s my face. Softer, framed by hair longer than I’ve worn it in years, but undoubtedly my face.
She wears my coat, but the button on the shoulder isn’t missing. She doesn’t move, just stares ahead from her place a little to the left of my reflection in the mirror.
I choose to ignore her. I’ve a talent for pushing to the side from years of practice.
Of course that doesn’t make her go away. I still see her every time I look in the mirror. Her appearances vary. Some days her hair is in a bun, sometimes it’s cut short and dyed a burgundy I haven’t seen since college. One day she wears glasses I lost five years ago, another she goes without, no wrinkles from years of squinting around her eyes.
No matter the form she takes I ignore her and she just stares ahead.
Until the day she shifts, leans in close to the ear of my reflection and I see her lips move. I don’t actually hear the words, and while I’ve never been able to read lips, I think she might say “You lied.”
There is the ghost of a breath against the shell of my ear.
I stop passively ignoring her. Now, I actively try to block her from my sight.
First, I cover the mirrors.
I see her in the panes of my window when I come home from work late at night. She’s wearing a t-shirt I threw away in high school, her lips repeating the same words over and over.
So, I close all the blinds and don’t wash the windows. The latter isn’t a challenge.
I see her in the standing water of the kitchen sink. Amidst the dishes that have been soaking for a week, she stares up wearing inexpertly applied makeup I don’t attempt any more and jewelry in piercings that have long since closed from disuse.
I drain the sink before I can tell if she’s speaking but leave the dishes.
Tonight, I see her in my glass of vodka. When she whispers I don’t have to read her lips, distorted as they are by the curvature of the cut glass, because I can hear clearly, if quietly, “You lied.”
I drop the glass and it shatters. The pieces spread out over the floor and I can see her movement in the flashing surfaces.
“You lied,” she says again.
“About what?” I whisper, my own words loud in the empty dark flat.
There is no answer.
I sweep the pieces into a pile in the corner and leave them to go to bed.
I no longer need to see her anymore to know she’s there. I smell her in the faint hint of ylang-ylang from a perfume I have long stopped bothering to apply. I feel her in a phantom weight pressing down onto the edge of my bed when I won’t get up with the second alarm.
And of course, I hear her.
Again.
“You lied.”
And again.
“You lied.”
And again.
“You lied.”
Her voice gets stronger every time. The shape of the sound familiar if foreign as it isn’t my lips, tongue, and throat forming the words.
As I lie in bed, I feel the words move the hair around my ear.
“You lied.”
I rise from the bed and rush to the bathroom, rip the sheet from the mirror, and meet the eyes of my ghost.
She stares back at me from a face I wore just a week ago.
“We lied,” she says.
“About what?” I demand.
She tilts her head and a tear slides from the corner of her eye. My eye. My face.
“We said it would get better,” we say, our voice the rustle of a hundred journal pages all swearing that next year, next week, tomorrow, this time…this time we would change.