Digital Ghosts

Sometimes I sit before a glowing screen

and scroll through all my ghosts,

unable to decide which memory

I want to vanish most.

Some apparitions rise uninvited,

persistent, pestering

trying to drag me backward

into versions of myself I’ve already buried.

I tell them no.

My life is different now.

I live differently.

There is no honest way to translate a becoming

through a phone screen.

No caption can explain the distance

between who I was

and who I am learning to be.

I stare at images, thinking I am confronting my ghosts,

but maybe this is what pulls me under the deepest.

Failed loves linger.

Friendships that dissolved without ceremony

pace the halls of my mind.

Their echoes live inside my phone

unkind messages, sharp words,

pressed into memory like bruises

that never fully fade.

Mistakes wander freely.

Failures repeat themselves,

time after time,

unreleased by the passing years.

Sometimes the haunting begins at five a.m.

Morning barely breathing,

light just beginning to spill

and I reach for my phone,

inviting the ghosts back in.