Dimmed Sunlight

I keep her pictures in what Generation Alpha would see as a vintage box but I know it is from Old Navy; and holds that smells of old chapstick and age. Photos on all four sides of the box of memories on developed Polaroids slipped in. Lift the top and there she is, frozen at thirty-eight, laughing like a brass bell in a summer parade. In every shot her shoulders are square, spine fluid like a proud river, hands mid-air as though the punchline has just landed and she’s gifting the air back to the world. She looks at the camera the way sunflowers look at the sun with a guaranteed certainty that it will rise again.

Some nights when the moon presses her silver palms against my window, I hear her moving around the apartment and moving objects she should not be able to touch. The ghost of a woman I used to be should not rattle chains but she hums between the floorboards. Sometimes I wake up to the scent of inner trauma healed scrubbing at the soul and in the distance a stage-light warmth to prove there is evidence that she has rifled through my first-aid kit trying to heal herself and and my memories in equal measure. She is furiously curious, this echo of myself. Curious…and impatient.

What is dark study of what lingers after possibility has collapsed? Therapist rambles on explaining a sketched timeline of birth, childhood, assault to present.

“Where,” she asks, tapping the pen, “does the ghost live?”

“Everywhere the line fractures,” I say. “And in the blank space that follows.”

I do not tell her that the ghost also lives in my cervical spine, in the creaking C-notes of C5 and C7, in the way my trapezius knots like mourning ribbon when I lift my chin too high. Pain is the séance she uses to speak through me. Every pop of cartilage is Morse code whispering “remember”.

Remember how it felt to stretch without flinching.

Remember the auditorium of laughter you carried in your chest.

Remember the promise you made to heal everyone you touched, even yourself.

She reminds me most while I’m rinsing rice for dinner or at work; fleeting moments so ordinary they forget to be guarded. I lean forward and lightning forks through my neck, and there she is, tapping the inside of my skull like a polite but insistent guest.

I scroll my phone and see two timelines spliced into a single photograph.

Half of my brain sees the pre-incident me, glow turned up to eleven. She’s holding a CPR dummy at an in-service, pretending to teach it karaoke, classmates doubled over beside her. The caption reads “Saving lives & stealing mics.” Laughter and bonding ensues.

The contrasting photo of present-day me, same scrubs, but the fabric pulls tight across a brace that steadies my neck. My smile is cautious, angled like a partial eclipse. The caption is clinical “Week 12 post-injury. Progress is nonlinear, but we move.” Assessing a pre me and post me; in a clear sophomore class of dissecting a frog kind of way.

Instagram offers a slider… let’s drag to compare. I drag and drag and drag and drag. My phone becomes a hinge of the two versions folding toward each other but never quite fused. They simply overlay, translucent, as if one of us were photoshopped into the other’s life.

The ghost leaves a comment only I can see “Which brightness do you prefer?”

I dare not answer because the real reply is neither or both. A new light is softer, yes; but fortified. It glows like stained glass with it’s radiance that comes not from the glass itself but from what manages to pass through the cracks.

If laughter was her signature then it is clear that anger is mine. She stalks me like a wolf with my own footprints in its teeth.

I sit on the cliff’s edge of every day on a metaphorical granite overlooking a sea of what-ifs until I feel the wind of vengeance whip through my hair. The ghost crouches beside me, swinging her legs as if the drop were mere inches. She wants to leap backward into a moment that can be rewritten. I want to leap forward into a justice system that never asked for proof of harm carved into bone.

Some evenings I imagine us merging, her light and my flame, a magnesium flash bright enough to blind the world into believing us; but dawn always comes. And I am still here, rage unspent, coffee cooling on the windowsill beside the box of photographs of a woman I do not know anymore.

The ghost sighs. “I taught you to heal,” she whispers. “Not to burn.”

“Well, I’m doing both,” I whisper back. “And besides you know that fire sterilizes everything.”

Healing? I have learned has its own time signature, syncopated to it’s own stubbornness.

Forty years to surface from childhood bruises and to tread water where betrayal once anchored my lungs. Then, in the instant between heartbeats at a company party, the metronome shattered and I sank again.

Now each day is a rest note…one beat of silence, two beats of pain, a tentative half-note of hope. Physical therapy teaches my muscles to remember themselves. Meditation teaches my nerves to forget. I lace affirmations into the regimen to soothe my rage.

The ghost applauds my choreography of survival. Yet she keeps her distance, hovering just beyond the radius of the lamp I bought to mimic daylight. She says fluorescence gives her headaches yet I think she simply finds the present too bright and too dim all at once.

Tonight I spread the photographs on the floor like tarot cards. Present-day me kneels in the circle they form. The ghost steps into the center, barefoot, luminous.

“What now?” she asks.

“Co-captain,” I answer. “Your laugh, my roar. Your steadiness, my scars. We treat the spine like a ley line…every crack a portal we fill with gold like a soulful Kintsugi since we are without the missing pieces, the picture feels smaller. But with gold, the picture gets deeper.”

She tilts her head. The clicking in my own neck echoes the motion. For once, it doesn’t hurt.

Outside, dawn stitches blue into the skyline. Inside, our shadows overlap until you cannot tell which one of us is the apparition. She reaches out, fingertip hovering just above my sternum, and where she almost touches, warmth blooms steadier than rage, softer than nostalgia. A light recalibrated.

“Keep the box,” she says. “But live out here.”

Then the sun breaches the horizon, and she dissolves into its glow, leaving behind not absence but architecture rooms in my marrow where laughter and fury can cohabitate, chambers where healing hums electric beneath scar tissue, corridors where new photographs will one day hang beside the old.

The ghost of who I was is gone, imagined, never existed

and also, gloriously, still here,

a resonance in the spine,

a different shade of light,

the part of the story that makes the rest of it echo.

The incident…present me ponders and ponders…

If I had never been injured, I think I would’ve finally stepped fully into the kind of peace I fought so hard to earn. My body would have felt like a home again and not a battlefield. I’d likely be dancing more, laughing louder, unafraid to move or reach or turn my head too quickly. I would be where I was supposed to be. I imagine myself walking into rooms with a looseness in my spine, trusting the air around me not to betray me. My healing wouldn’t have been interrupted and it would have matured into something gentler, something that made room for softness without the need for vigilance. The version of me that wasn’t attacked would have given even more freely, with both hands, never second-guessing whether the world would bite back; because I learned that I do not have to always keep my guard up. That I would be allowed to rest my sword.

That version of me would have continued seeking joy like it was her profession and sharing it like she was born of a Titan. She would have built more projects, connections, inside jokes…without the shadow of trauma fogging the mirror every morning. She’d probably be mentoring others again showing them how to survive & not just in theory; but in practice with her own story tucked safely in the past. The neck brace would never have existed. Neither would the flashbacks or the way I now pause before entering a room full of strangers. That version of me would have stood taller, literally and emotionally, not because she was unbreakable, but because she was finally free to rest in her own strength without fear of it being used against her.

I grieve her every day. Her spirit is folded deeply into the current version of me. Hidden in the things I stubbornly refuse to give up on. I can feel her in the pulse of my rage haunting my dreams, in the sweetness of my compassion, in the careful rebuilding of my dreams. If I hadn’t been assaulted, I would have been radiant. And because I was assaulted, I’ve had to find a new kind of radiance one that carries shadows but shines anyway.