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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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

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.

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