Ghost from my past haunts me, but leaves me without answers

By David McElroy · March 21, 2021

She never really goes away, but she’s also never really there. Like a ghost from another life — a life which I once lived with her — she haunts my dreams and intrudes on my waking hours.

It’s not convenient to live with a ghost from the past. My conscious mind has buried her over and over again. But just when I start thinking I’ve won the long struggle to put her behind me, I remember she’s still in this world. And it all comes flooding back.

Her face. Her eyes. Her voice. Her words. Her habits and her thoughts. Her goodness and her fatal flaws. And then I can’t stop the tidal wave of emotions. It exhausts me, because I’m left with nothing but unanswered questions.

As I walked down an aisle of a grocery store late Saturday night, I suddenly heard something in my heart ask, “Do you still miss me? I still miss you.”

And I felt her presence. She was there. But she was there as a shimmering ghost from the past, not as a real woman who could love me or answer my questions.

“Where are you right now? What are you doing tonight?”

My ghost is always there to remind me that she exists, but never to answer questions. I don’t know whether she’s happy. I don’t know whether she’s forgotten me. I don’t know if she’s sleeping or if she’s still awake at 3 a.m. as I wonder about her.

I don’t want to ask these questions. I don’t want to wonder. It would be far more convenient if the ghost stayed away. But I can’t help myself.

“Why didn’t you choose me? Why did you simply fade away with no explanation?”

I shouldn’t need to have these questions answered, but they torture me. Every time I’ve convinced myself that it doesn’t matter anymore — that it can’t matter since she obviously moved on — I eventually have one of those moments when I realize I’m mistaken. I haven’t put it in the past. I do still care. I do still hurt.

“Was something about me not good enough for you? I would have done anything for you.”

Men often go to absurd lengths to be acceptable to the women they love. (I’m sure women have their version of this, too, but I know this side of the table.) They’ll become wealthy or successful to please the women they love. They’ll build whatever she wants. They’ll change their entire lives just because that’s what it takes to make her happy.

And they will be happy to make the sacrifices — if her love is freely given in return. I would have done anything for her, and I’ll never know why it wasn’t enough.

“Did you really love me? Or were you just fooling yourself with a fantasy to soothe your unhappiness about other things? I don’t even know anymore.”

I’ve lived with the fear of being abandoned — especially by a woman who I love — ever since my mother left in early childhood. I’ve talked about this before.

Did I choose someone who I unconsciously knew would abandon me, in some psychologically twisted need to live out the same old script again? I don’t know. I guess it could be.

“What do you look like this moment? What’s the look in your eyes like these days? Are you sharing your burdens and fears with anyone? Or have you gone back to hiding everything inside? And do you still love me at all?”

The questions are endless. And my heart aches.

There are more of the questions when the ghost comes at night. It’s almost as though she’s sitting right here beside me. I can almost touch her.

I can see her face. I see her eyes and her hair. Her hands. Her lips. But I can see right through this illusion. And just when I think she’s about to look back at me — just when I think she’s going to speak or reach out to me — the ghostly image smiles the warm smile that I know so well. Then it fades away.

And once again, I’m left with nothing but an empty room. And a hurting heart. And a lot of unanswered questions that haunt me when I least expect them to appear.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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