The Ghost on the Line

Okay. The mystery is solved. The great, suffocating unknown I was hyperventilating about a month ago has a name.

It’s her ex.

The phantom caller rotting away my days, the invisible wire dragging her mood down into the freezing dark—it’s just some guy she broke up with approximately two years ago. Two entire, spinning years of the earth rotating around the sun, and he is still dialing her number. And worse, she is still answering it.

I don’t know why she’s still talking to him. I ask her why he is calling, and she just stares at me with a perfectly blank expression and says, “No reason.” No reason. Just casual, administrative check-ins from the ghost of boyfriends past.

I told her to minimize the contact. It started out as a polite suggestion, a rational boundary drawn in the sand by a supposedly rational man. But they didn’t minimize it. In fact, it escalated. They started calling each other multiple times a day. Multiple times a day, the phone vibrates, the temperature in the room drops, and she steps away to whisper into the receiver.

So I pushed harder. I keep telling her to stop talking to him. I am not comfortable with it. I am actually crawling out of my own skin with the suffocating, neurotic jealousy of it all. I’ve told her a few times. Actually, I’ve told her several times, my voice getting louder, the panic leaking out through my teeth.

And every time, she promises. She looks at me and promises she will tell him to stop.

But then the temper flares. Oh god, she is so short-tempered. The second I apply any actual pressure, that cute, prominent, strawberry-shaped nose flares and the room absolutely combusts. She flips from apologetic promises to blinding, white-hot fury in the space of a single breath. The argument explodes, the air turns to ash, and somehow, by the end of it, I am the one apologizing .

She promises she’ll stop. But the phone keeps ringing.