The Ghost Of You.

The ghost of you moves through me like the smoke of your cigarettes, a fragrance I cannot name but cannot forget. It lingers in the quiet corners of the house, pressing its palms against the glass whispering through the floorboards, breathing into the edges of my rib cage where love and grief still wrestle like feral children.

They call it mourning, but mourning implies clarity, what I feel is fog; thick with contradictions, heavy with the weight of all that was both given and withheld. It is not only death I grieve, but the life I longed for with you and never received.

My Mother, but also my first country. A homeland I could never fully inhabit. Your language was survival, your anthem suspicion, your soil toiled by discipline and scarcity. Raised in the shadows of a communist childhood, you learned to ration tenderness as if it were contraband. To treat affection as a dangerous luxury best withheld, lest it be stolen. That world of Iron and red banners never left you; it followed you like a spectre into our kitchen, into the ways you touched me, into the way you loved with your hands always half closed.

I see myself as a girl in your eyes sometimes. The photographs still glimmer, a child, porcelain figure dressed in borrowed gowns, smiling for flashes that burned hotter than the sun. I was not a child but a showcase, not a daughter but proof; proof you could present to the world that you had succeeded in sculpting intelligence and beauty. A double edged alter, offered worship, and it demanded sacrifice. I learned too early that my face was your currency, that my worth could be tallied in looks and applause. But once I let the lights dim, I was left alone with my hunger.

Did you know that you planted that hunger in me? That your shadow fell across my skin before I was old enough to understand what shadow meant? You brushed my hair until it gleamed, as if each stroke might polish away the parts of me that did not belong to you. I was your reflection, your project, your evidence that you were worthy; and I grew up wondering if I was daughter or disguise, blood or billboard, child or projection.

Our home was made of music and silence. The Silence could crush, but the music would save us, if only for a breath. We would sing in cars, let symphonies carry us through foreign cities, lose ourselves in cathedrals where the organ lifted its thunder to the rafters. In those rare moments, I saw the girl you once were, eyes wide with wonder, unguarded, almost tender. Music was the language we could share. When the words between us rusted, into accusation.

The way your breath caught at a coastline, the way you leaned into beauty as though it might absolve you, I clung to those fragments like a child gathers shells from a storm battered shore, stitching them into the quilt of a mother I longed to believe in.

Beauty was also your cage, you wore it like armour, used it like a blade. Your face; admired and adored was your shield against the world's cruelties. But it was also your weapon against me. Love became a ledger, affection a transaction. I learned too young that tenderness had a price that to be loved meant to be useful, that approval was something earned, never given freely. Our family spoke in the currency of money, each coin clinking louder than care, and I mistook debt for devotion, believing I must always pay to be worthy of being seen.

And Yet.

And yet, the thread of forgiveness has always wound itself through my chest delicate but persistent, like ivy forcing its way into stone. Not because you asked for it, not because you deserved it, but because I could not breathe without it. To forgive was to prise open the fist around my throat, to carve a little space inside for the child to rest without your voice hissing shame.

Even now, I whisper forgiveness like a prayer to the girl you once were, the one who learned too soon that love was conditional, the one who turned her wounds into weapons. I forgive her. Even as I grieve the woman she became.

Now you are gone, and what remains is your ghost, woven into my marrow like thread. You live in the way my reflection betrays me, your cheekbones mapped onto mine your eyes glancing back from the mirror. You live in the way music still brings me to my knees, in the way I cannot walk through an airport without hearing your footsteps echo behind me.

Your absence is not clean; it is stitched with shadows., a tangle of wounds and wonders I cannot untwine.

What do we do with the ghost of a mother who was both sanctuary and storm? Perhaps we write. Perhaps we sing the songs we once shared, letting the notes rise like smoke into a sky that may or may not hold you. Perhaps we love ourselves with the tenderness you could not bear to give. Perhaps we name the truth. Even if our voices tremble, that you were complicated, fractured, cruel, radiant. That you were both wound and compass. That you left me both broken and blooming.

This is my goodbye to you, not the simple hymn of sainthood, but the tangled ballad of what it is to love someone who could not love cleanly in return. You were my first ghost, long before you left. Haunting me with your absence even in your presence. This time, made hauntingly permanent.

Still, I choose this: to release what you could not, to forgive what you would not, to end the inheritance of wounds so that your ghost does not feed on the lives that come. I will keep the music, the hunger for beauty, the fragments of wonder, but I will lay down the leger, burn the arithmetic of affection, refuse to barter my worth again.

And when the night is still, when the ghost of you presses her forehead against mine, I will whisper into the dark: Rest if you can. Rest if you will, I am here, breathing, haunted but alive, singing the songs we once shared into a world still capable of beauty. this, too was your gift. This too is how you remain.

The ghost of you will walk with me always, not as a chain, but as a shadow that taught me the shape of life. And though love was never simple with you, it is still love that spills from my mouth now, soft and stubborn, like a prayer said to an empty room