no matter what, we must eat to live .

i’m going to learn how to make dishes. i’ve always wanted to use a pottery wheel. i am going to paint those dishes orange and yellow too. i’m gonna make you hate orange and yellow by the time we’re forty. i’m going to make you a mug. another stupid orange mug. i am going to make you a mug and i am going to press my thumbprint softly into the handle right where i know yours will rest. i never thought i’d live long enough to have my own dishes.

I’d put rainbow sticky notes on the walls to see if a ghost would move them as I slept with my head under the covers each night. I didn’t know what a haunting was, but evil had made itself so comfortable in that house that it seeped into the walls like nicotine and fear, poisoning the air supply for generations to come. I live beside a graveyard, after all. Ghosts latch on to vulnerable people. I’m still not quite sure if they ever leave.

Sometimes a ghost will take on a human form. I am possessed by the ghost of my father’s anger, and his father’s anger, and his father’s anger as well. I think that a father is a type of ghost. Having a father is a type of haunting I will never be able to explain on a page. There are no blood curdling screams, no pools of corn-syrup-fake-blood sticking to my bathroom floor. The ghost instead lives in the hole his cellphone made in the living room wall back in 2009. The ghost lives in those green eyes I share with my sister that we’d both do anything to change. The ghost lives inside of me, and I really don’t know how to perform an exorcism on my own flesh and blood.

Apparently, there are no clinical cases of haunting, and it is instead an alphabet soup of diagnoses that make sure I will never have children of my own. The haunting is hereditary, after all. It doesn’t matter where I end up, I will pack the skeletons in my closet into a moving van and cry when I wake and the graves I placed on opposite sides of the house have already been dug up.

I don’t think that I live in a haunted house anymore.

I think that I myself might be the haunted house, with smoke pouring out of the windows and a foundation that is crumbling as we speak. I am haunted by the ghost of my mother’s sadness and her mother’s sadness and her mother’s sadness as well. A mother is a type of ghost that does not wish to be a ghost. If a ghost is meant to be invisible, my mother dedicated her life to fulfilling that prophecy— as if Weight Watchers or the expensive grocery store would reanimate her, as if enough Diet Coke could replace the formaldehyde sitting in her veins. Having a mother is a type of haunting, one that I will never escape. The ghost found me in the form of secret social media accounts and a diary full of calculations when I was twelve years old, in the form of sugar free energy drinks and a near death encounter with hypophosphatemia just a month before my eighteenth birthday. The ghost is in my body still, no matter how hard I try to kill it. It will always live in my kitchen, slamming empty cupboard doors and whispering promises into my ears. My mother will bring this ghost into every kitchen I ever try to relax in. My mother’s kitchen is haunted by her own mother, who’s mother passed this ghost on to her.

The only way to stop being haunted is to become a ghost yourself. I do not like that I may already be someone else’s haunting. In an ideal world, I am invisible— not like a ghost, but like air. I do not want to take up space for anyone. The only way I wouldn’t see blood on my hands would be if nobody were to think of me at all. I hate knowing that I am my brother’s ghost, that I haunt this house just as our parents do. Being alive is a type of haunting, I think. One can be haunted by themself. I think that maybe everyone is.

I will never understand the extent to which this house is haunted. There are ghosts that my parents will never tell me about, ghosts which still possess them in ways too dangerous to share with me. Whether I know their names or not, the ghosts hiding under creaky stairs and bleeding floorboards are family heirlooms I will inherit against my will, no matter how many attempts I make to bury them.

Maybe I do believe in haunted houses.

I’m scared that every house I live in will be haunted. Not haunted by my father, or my mother, or any of the mothers and fathers who came before them, but myself. I am the ghost at the back of my closet, and always will be. I scare myself in the mirror, I thump around in the hallways at hours that make my neighbours despise me. Haunting is what I learned to do best— after all, what better teachers than a pair of ghosts?

I used to think my house was haunted, back when I was a kid.

my grandmother used to make plum muffins with the sourest fruits she could find. they baked into something sweet, something soft. something that fed me. my mom made plum muffins today with the sour plums from the grocery store and i was brought to tears while i ate two of them fresh out the oven. they were better than granny's. she's not dead. she's not dead but i don't know if she'd want me if she found out what i really am. i ate another muffin and it tasted like dusty summers away from home my house.

i ate three nectarines today without even stopping to breathe. the juice dripped down my chin as i swallowed them down without chewing like i hadn't eaten in years. when i was a kid my grandparents would come with a box of cup noodles and kraft dinner and tinned peaches and i thought it was a gift because those were all of my favourites. i thought christmas hampers were like winning a contest and food bank trips were like grocery shopping where my mom never panicked. i ate those nectarines until i felt sated and i almost cried. they were sweet and sour and i nearly chipped my tooth on the stone on the inside.