The Room for Eliza

At the end of the hall, there’s a room we don’t talk about.

Mother calls it the “Sewing Room”. She says it in the same tone she uses when talking about frozen casseroles or tax deadlines; blunt, flat, leaving no room for a second opinion. The “Sewing Room” hasn’t seen a spool of thread in, at least, thirteen years; a blatant lie, so we don’t talk about it long.

Father, for his part, doesn’t call it anything. When he walks past, he keeps his eyes forward, like the door might unhinge itself if looked at the wrong way.

I call it what it is. Eliza’s room.

Eliza never lived.

She wasn’t stillborn. She wasn’t a miscarriage. She wasn’t a name scribbled in a baby book or lost in a second-trimester scare. She wasn’t an abortion. She wasn’t a failed adoption. She wasn’t even a possibility.

Eliza is just someone I made up in my head when I was five years old. My imaginary sister; the sibling I always wanted but never had gotten.

Most kids outgrow things like that. I didn’t.

She showed up one day, wearing my old Sunday dress; the one with the blue embroidery at the hem. I’d grown too tall for it, but Eliza hadn’t; she always stayed the same.

I had made her smaller than me, so I could take care of her. I made her smart. Shy, except when it was just the two of us. And always, always kind.

At first, my parents humored me.

At dinner, they’d set up an extra space and play along. “What does Eliza want for dessert?” “Tell your sister not to put her elbows on the table.” That kind of thing.

I think it made them feel clever, good at parenting. Better than their own parents had been, who would’ve shouted about invisible friends and flicked cigarette ash on the rug.

But it didn’t stop. I kept seeing her.

By age nine, I was drawing Eliza’s face in school notebooks. By twelve, I was leaving space on the couch for her. At thirteen, I insisted she needed her own room.

And they gave it to her.

I can’t tell you why they said yes. Maybe they thought it would help me outgrow it. Maybe they were tired. Maybe it was one of those decisions that doesn’t feel like a decision at all, like slipping into a daydream and forgetting when it started.

Whatever the reason, the guest room was emptied out, walls painted lavender, one twin bed installed. Her name went on the door in painted wooden letters. E-L-I-Z-A.

From that day forward, she was real. At least to me.

I’m twenty-six now, back in town because my mother fell and broke her hip. I was supposed to stay for a week. That was six weeks ago.

Eliza’s room, the “Sewing Room” as it’s been called for some years now, hasn’t changed. I peeked inside last night. Dust lies across the dresser like fine snow. There’s a hairbrush on the vanity, a pink ribbon caught in the bristles. Someone, probably younger me, taped photos to the mirror; they’re all just empty corners of my room and hers, from Eliza’s perspective.

There are no pictures of Eliza. Of course not.

But sometimes, I swear I can see her reflection in the mirror.

Sometimes, I hear her humming.

My therapist calls it “complicated grief.” I don’t correct her. It’s easier than trying to explain that I am grieving someone who never was.

“It’s not unusual,” she says gently. “Loneliness can fill itself however it can.”

“But she wasn’t some coping mechanism,” I say. “I remember her. She braided my hair. We shared secrets. We fought. We made up. I still feel bad about that last fight we had.”

Dr. Malcolm only nods. She has that polite neutrality of someone who’s been trained to listen without believing. But I see it. The brief flicker of something behind her eyes; concern or maybe recognition.

She had someone once too, I think.

When I was seventeen, Eliza stopped appearing.

It wasn’t dramatic. No big goodbye. No final scene.

She just faded. Like a dream you can’t hold onto.

I’d sit on the bed in her room and talk, waiting for her voice. The silence stretched. One week, then two. Eventually, I stopped visiting.

I told myself I’d grown out of it. Like my parents had long stopped feeding into it, yet keeping the room as it now is.

But I didn’t grow out of her.

She haunted everything I wrote. Every story had a little sister with dark curls and clever eyes. Every poem had her name in the margins. In college, I took a psychology class and wrote a term paper on “personified memory displacement,” trying to diagnose myself out of loving her. It didn’t work.

I went on dates and never told anyone about Eliza. I didn’t want to be the weird girl with the ghost-sibling.

But sometimes, I’d slip and say “we” when I meant “I”. People assumed I meant roommates, or friends, or just a grammatical quirk.

They never knew I meant her.

Last night, the door to her room was open again.

I know I closed it.

And the music box on her shelf, the little ceramic ballerina with a cracked foot, was playing. Just three notes on a loop. Plink-plink-plink.

I went inside. Sat on the edge of her bed. Like I used to.

“Eliza,” I whispered. “If you’re still here... I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry I tried to forget.”

There was no reply. Just the silence of dust and air.

But come morning, the brush on her vanity was turned sideways. And a strand of dark brown hair, not mine, lay beside it.

I’ve stopped pretending she wasn’t real.

Not in the way people mean. Not flesh-and-blood. But real in the way a song gets stuck in your head. Real in the way grief becomes a second language. Real in the way love doesn’t care what’s true, only what’s felt.

Sometimes, the presence that shapes you most is the one no one else can see.

And maybe that’s the secret of ghosts, not that they’re dead but that they never had the chance to live outside of you. Maybe we all carry one.

In my case, her name is Eliza.

And I’m learning how to live with her again.