That is rarer than sympathy, rarer even than judgment.
To stay with something without rushing to excuse it or condemn it. To let it stand before you for a moment unsoftened. That is harder than people admit.
There’s a particular kind of reader who makes it this far into a confession like this. Someone patient enough to listen without immediately rearranging the story into something that feels safer.
They observe stories like mine from a comfortable emotional height, but you didn’t do that. Since you’ve been such a good girl, let me tell you a little secret. When I was a kid, I really believed in ghosts.
I was almost obsessed with them. I couldn’t let go of the idea that something like that was real, something I already felt like while still alive.
A presence moving through the world, mostly unnoticed, watching everything from a distance.
For a while, I was even convinced I could feel them, a bit like I can feel you now. Back then, I saw it like a child would. I still believe in ghosts, but I think about them differently now; what a ghost is, or what it might be.
I think a ghost can be a lot of things.
A memory or a thought that won’t leave. Something you never said out loud. Grief, anger, maybe even guilt.
Most of the time, though, it’s simpler than that.
It’s just something we want to believe is still there, something we need or wish for. I have to admit, I wished for someone like you to come along for a long time, and now you’re here.
So let’s get back to the story, end this pause, and see who haunts whom when all of this is over, little Ghost.
The Disillusionment
Chapter 5
Withdrawal doesn’t end in one clean moment, no matter how badly people want it to. They like imagining there’s some final breaking point, but the body doesn’t work like that, and neither does the mind.
Suffering drags itself out of you slowly, and even after the worst of it passes, something ugly always stays behind. Something that keeps clawing at you when the room gets too peaceful, and there’s nobody left to distract you from yourself.
The shaking fades first, then the sweating, and that strange electrical buzzing beneath the skin withdraws by degrees until your bones no longer feel like glass filled with insects.
Even relief arrives in increments. Sleep returns the same way, unevenly.
An hour here, two there, never enough at first to trust it.
Then, over time, the mind stops racing long enough to remember what silence used to feel like before it became something hostile.
I remember the first morning I woke and noticed the storm had receded. Not vanished, receded. There is a big difference in that. One suggests cure, the other only distance.
What struck me even then was that no one had brought me through it. No one had carefully tapered the medication, no one sat beside me through the nights when my body fought its way back toward itself.
It passed because the body eventually exhausts its ways of protesting.
There is something almost brutal in that kind of recovery.
It comes not through mercy but attrition.
The body can survive abandonment in ways the mind keeps studying long afterward. I suspect that was one of the first times I began trusting endurance more than help.
The orphanage hallway looked exactly the same when I returned. Nothing had changed, except me.
That can be its own kind of disorientation, when a place receives you back unchanged after you have altered inside it.
The sedation had left my system, but it hadn’t taken the emptiness with it.
If anything, it had deepened, as though months of being managed had hollowed out a little more room for it.
