The Second Ghost and the Squalor

Okay, life has been absolute hell.

I don’t know why I stepped off the quiet pavement of my own existence and walked straight into this blazing squalor. I look around this apartment now—the unwashed tea cups, the heavy, suffocating smell of stale arguments hanging in the curtains—and I just think: why?

It turns out there isn’t just one ghost on the line.

There’s two. Not one, but two entirely separate exes that she absolutely cannot stop talking to. It isn’t just a lingering emotional glitch; it is an active, desperate labor. She goes to extreme, sweating lengths to find corners of the house, locked bathrooms, and silent stairwells, just to whisper into the receiver. And then comes the equally strenuous labor of hiding it from me. Wiping the digital slate clean. Looking me directly in the eyes over a shared plate of cheap food and lying with the practiced, flat affect of a seasoned criminal.

She has cheated at least twenty-five times in this regard. At least. That is just the number I can prove, the raw data I’ve scraped off the domestic battlefield.

Life has been hell. It is a grinding, physical degradation.

I sit here and I think about the supreme dignity of just being alone. I think about the quiet, unbothered rhythm of my single life. It was so much better. The simple, uncomplicated mechanics of masturbation and a quiet evening, completely free from the exhausting, dirty politics of another human being’s lies. You don’t know the absolute luxury of silence until someone starts filling it with deceit.

Why did I get into this? Because I thought I could outsmart my own isolation? Because I looked at a pretty face and ignored the violent machinery behind it?

I am completely, undeniably culpable for my own misery.