You’re Not Alone

The entirety of (Western, at least) modern culture is built on the idea of having live-in full-time labor to keep up our houses and community expectations as to clothing, meals, and group activities. In the absence of slave labor (WHICH WE SHOULD NOT HAVE), child labor (WHICH WE SHOULD NOT HAVE), and obligatory spouse-forced labor (WHICH WE SHOULD NOT HAVE), either the culture of the household needs to change to accommodate the capitalist/industrial norms of 5+ days away from the home during daylight hours or, like, we need to stop having 5+ days away from the home during daylight hours.

Because-- it's a hell of a thing when I look back on lockdown and miss how much love and attention I was able to give to my shitty apartment, okay?

And today, at home because of snow but still somehow "at work" because we learned nothing, apparently-- I am realizing how much I exist as a ghost that haunts my own home. In the brief moments I appear, I move through rooms that once were loved and cared for, unchanged and dusty; I wander through a space that knows it once was someone's everything, and now lies dormant, waiting for brief flashes of life; I see my own dishes left out, like evidence of a long-gone person that lived and loved and left, here and not-here, and I am wholly disconnected from the moment I created them-- I just know that they are mine, and they are frozen in the moment that I left them, and that I feel a sad, unknown emptiness when I see them and must, again, just pass them by.

(I have always struggled to write ghost stories. I love haunted houses, but I don't know how to find my way into telling stories about them.)