Look for Ghosts with Me

Look for ghosts with me in the basement of an eyeless building on the furthest edge of town. Say nothing when I ask you if you’ve found any. Just smile, softly, a little sadly, the way you always do.

Look for ghosts with me in video after video, scraped off the corroded bottom of internet forums. Help me sift through hundreds of hours of midnight hallways and empty living rooms where commenters insist that if you look, really and truly, you can see something crouched in the corner or watching from a window. Type file names into an almighty spreadsheet we share between us. Help me filter the maybes from the nothing at alls.

Look for ghosts with me as one anonymous hour bleeds into the next, as the night wind picks up outside, as it exhales waves through unmown grass on an unused lawn beneath stammering streetlights. Leave your lipstick on the rim of a paper coffee cup that I refill without you ever needing to ask. Let me look, every now and again, over your shoulder, past our own dark reflections, at parking lots, stairwells, cemetery gates, guest rooms with shelves crowded with sightless dolls that abruptly tumble to the floor, seemingly of their own accord, until you point out where the fishing wire’s been fastened. Let me stand there a second believing that the footage on your screen holds any more promise than mine.

Look for ghosts with me on moonless nights. Join me in singing the pareidolia blues. Smirk at the jump scares that still get me from time to time when a prank slips in through faults and fissures in the submission process. Make me feel like it’s alright to laugh. Remind me, wordlessly, that there are worse jobs out there. Listen to me when I tell you that it’s not about the money, not just about the money. Ask me what it’s about then, so I finally have a chance to tell you.

Look for ghosts with me while the microwave spins your instant noodles. Write emails to the board members. Have me look them over, not to check for the absence of typos but for the presence of that one vital word: we haven’t found anything yet. Tolerate my clumsy suggestions about how to word lines you’ve already gotten perfect. Give me a break from the screens, a chance to smell the shampoo in your hair or feel your sleeve, for a second, brush mine.

Look for ghosts with me and explain once more the difference between a phantom and a flight jacket hung at a strange angle on a coat hanger. Teach me again all the telltale signs that the floating orbs caught by doorbell cams are just dust or insects or tiresome tricks of the light. Things that desperate minds try to anchor down with importance and meaning. Listen to me lie once again about needing another crash course in walking the invisible line between longing and reality, between wishful thinking and what’s actually there. Come over to my side of the table. Move your fingers to the keyboard and flick a few frames back. Preach the gospel of the God of the gaps. Lean in close as I pull up another screenshot of darkness and pretend yet again that I need to argue that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Not because I believe it but because I just want to talk.

Please.

Look for ghosts with me because I can’t bear to look alone.