Leave The Light On

made by Duane from a photo of me

We’re all haunted houses.

That’s what he wrote me back after I sent him the song Ghost, by Sigrid.

A friend had sent it to me a couple weeks ago and I fell deeply and instantly in love with it.

He and I talked about how gorgeous the concept of being someone’s ghost is. How no matter the story behind a meaningful love, we’re tethered to one another even by shadow.

I’ll always be your ghost.

Memories are all haunts.

Haunts are memories of all the people who have visited us.

We are built, every one of us, out of the people who we have let inside. We maintain these spaces that hold them. We dust the rooms. We leave lights on. We decide what to exorcise and what we can’t bring ourselves to remove.

We move through life haunted
and haunting.

But the haunting is not something left behind. It’s not the faint impression of a body in a bed long made. Not something that fades with enough time and tidying.

It moves. It exhales in the walls. It knows your name and the particular way you say it when you’re afraid.

Memory is not residue.
It is residence.

And the things we cannot let go of do not wait politely. They pace the length of us. They know which floorboards creak and where the light comes through. They drag their weight through the passageways we’ve tried to forget we built.

We hold them. And in holding them, we are slowly, quietly, and entirely reshaped by what we refuse to put down.

What we harbor, harbors us.

If you believe in ghosts and haunts, then you believe they linger because they’re waiting to be freed of something.

But love doesn’t free itself.

They’re waiting for us to be freed of them. We are our own unfinished business.

We can’t let them go.

We just can’t.

Love doesn’t always heal and fasten. It can carve you open without mercy.

Some rooms in our haunted house of self are there for everyone to see. We paint them bright and set the table and call it living. But there are wings of ourselves we keep battened. Windows we keep shuttered. Doors we pass a hundred times a day without opening.
Not because we’ve forgotten what’s inside.

Because we haven’t.

We are keepers and creators of our own haunting. We choose the relics. The photograph left face-down but not thrown away. The voicemail saved so long the phone it lived on is long dead. The t-shirt that has lost the smell but we keep reaching for it anyway, praying the scent will haunt us again.

And the ghosts. They aren’t frightening because they’re strange. They frighten because they are familiar. Because they wear the faces of who we were before. Of who we loved before. Of who we thought we’d become by now.

We built the doors here in this house. We hung them on their hinges. We never greased them. And we still act surprised when they swing open in the night.

We are all haunted.

But we are also the haunting.

We move through familiar halls of bodies we once held. We are woven into their walls. We clatter things they cannot name. We breathe cold spots in rooms they can’t stop returning to. We lie next to them in bed because we haven’t learned how to sleep without being wrapped within them.

It’s what we do when someone has left their shadow inside of us.

To be human is to be inhabited, and to inhabit. To carry the dead and the living and the lost. To be a house without blueprints. A layout unknown to anyone. Not even yourself.

Maybe this is just what it means to have loved anything at all. To have let someone walk through you and leave their toeprints in the carpet. We were never going to come away unchanged. We were never going to be empty houses. We shouldn’t be.

We were built for this. These hearts full of ghosts, these selves made of returns and presences and lights left on in the dark.

A life well lived is a life haunted.

Every person who mattered rearranged the furniture a little. Moved things we’re still looking for. Left doors open we’re still trying to close. Left some open we’re grateful for.

And you should always leave the light on. Welcome the ghosts, the memories and haunts and people who built you. You are a haunted vessel, and you should be. Even when the bones of it creak and moan more than settle.

Because a house full of ghosts is still full. And you have loved enough to carry it.

To be haunted is to be the proof that you mattered. Its weight is the specific gravity of having loved something you let inside.

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This was inspired by a conversation with Duane Toops. We both wrote a piece on the topic. You can find his here.

And the song was sent to me by the incredible Jennifer Love, MD

I love you 💋