Beth’s Ghost

She lays in bed alone
Late at night

Wide awake
Shrouded in the suffocating loneliness
That old familiar companion
That never leaves her side
Her mind drifts to a long ago
That is so out of reach now it’s almost
Too painful to remember
Her body heavy with the memories
Of what used to be
Before things got so dark
It feels like another life
One that wasn’t hers
Could never be hers

A million lifetimes ago
Like another dimension
Where a different version of herself exists
A happier version
Knowing only innocence & love

The nostalgia leaves her breathless

Knocking the wind out of her
Painful & joyful alike

She lays beneath her soft silken sheets

Feeling like a distorted replica of her former self

A contorted character in a dark novel, an empty shell of what used to be

As if her life were a convoluted story inspired by some distant reality that was once hers

Just when her despair
Reaches a new depth
I find myself seeping into the cracks
Of her shattered mind
Uninvited
Creeping into her darkest spaces
Taking up residence in her darkness
Feeling it surrounding me
Like a midnight melody
Somber, sweet, aching

She hears me
humming the song
She wrote
As she bolts upright in her bed
Trying to discern
If her midnight serenade is real or
A figment of her sad imagination
I journey through all the crevices of her brain, the recesses of her mind, and all the delicate veins, tracing the curves of her body with my tender touch
Trying to learn all of her ways
All of her secrets
The intimate longings of her heart
So I can sing them back to her

Mirroring her own love
And showering her in it
Like a waterfall of nectar cascading over
Her rocky, tumultuous world
And soothing the darkness in her soul

My humming gets louder
As she gets up and walks to the doorway
She hears my voice up the hall
Gently singing the song in her bones

One hand on the doorframe, she tentatively looks down the dark hallway, afraid of what she may see but her curiosity too strong to quell

Seeing my slender silhouette on the cream colored curtain, doing starlit pirouettes
My long hair blowing in the breeze
She freezes
And blinks
As I vanish into the night
She opens her eyes
And in that fraction of a second
I am gone
She walks along the hall til she reaches the opened window
And stares at the now blank curtain
blowing softly
As moonlight drifts in

She reaches out

And touches the curtain

Gently rubbing her hand down the soft fabric

Pulling it aside to look in back

Confusion written all over her face
As she looks around, peering into the darkness
Of the hall
The darkness matching the darkness within
She begins to slowly walk back to her room
Her hair hanging softly down her back
Resting against her pastel pink lacey lingerie top
That reveals the soft smooth ivory skin beneath

Her lips are full & pink
Glistening
As she calls out
To whatever apparition
Lurks in her darkness
I whisper her name
Into her ear
So lightly
Like the breeze
That creeps in through the window

She jumps
And shudders
A chill running up her spine
As she walks back to the window
And closes it
The curtains now hanging
Still, lifeless

Her bare feet make a soft padding sound
Against the wooden floorboards as they creak in the night
I silently float beside her
My mind connecting with hers
She can’t see me
But she can feel me
In every breath she takes
She turns to the side and catches my shadow
As I instantly disappear

She can hear my soothing voice
Caressing the shards of her mind
And feel my loving embrace
Around her shoulders
She pulls away
Unsure if it’s real or imagined
I move closer
Until my hair falls over her shoulder
Like a shadow in the night
My glossed red lips
Just barely touch her cheek
As she quickly reaches up
And brushes her cheek with her hand

She turns, abruptly

And we are face to face

So close, she can feel my breath in her face

Like the kiss of a midnight breeze

She sees through me

Then for a moment our eyes seem to meet

Just for one infinitesimal moment

A knowing look
suddenly crosses her face
Like a fleeting light
Piercing the darkness
Then fading away
As quickly as it appeared

She turns and walks briskly back
To her bedroom
And slams the door
Shutting me out
Willing me out of her mind
Out of her awareness
Out of her blo0dstream
Out of her soul

Her darkness closes in
And suffocates me
Pulling me into an endless abyss
I fall and fall
Free falling
Flailing
And crashing back into my own
World
Without her
All encompassing pain
Taking over
As I lay
Rejected & defeated
The ache
Taking over
As I lay in my bed
late into the night
I can feel her in the shadows
That surround the night
And I wonder if I’m haunting her
Tonight

Memories of me filling her mind
Memories of a love that never was
A love that could have been
but ended before it began
Memories & longings she wishes
only to banish

I lay in my darkness
Dreaming of her
In the moonlight
Memories of long ago
Of youthful, hopeful dreams now shattered, swirl around in my head as if to taunt me
As she haunts me
Tantalized by her wild beauty
Pulled into an endless night
Where I live in her nightmares
Aching for something
Homesick for a place that never existed
For a person never meant to be mine
Grieving for an old love
That never truly lived

But burns in me like a fire

That can’t be tamed

(I’m disappointed with how this poem is structured. But jetpack/WordPress won’t let me write a sentence or a few words and hit the enter or down key and have another sentence directly under it. It puts a space. I had to write this in my phone’s memo section and paste it here. But I decided to edit & add things. When I added a new sentence, it couldn’t be right under the one before it when I hit the enter key or whatever the key is called now to go to the space below a sentence or word. I saw someone else expressing the same problem while trying to write poems. For paragraphs in regular writing, like this, we don’t have to skip to underneath, but poems & songs are structured differently.

If I were to write a poem directly here instead of writing somewhere else and pasting it here

It

would

be

like

this.

Who wants all those spaces after each word or sentence in a song or poem? I always find myself rereading & editing my poems for days and days. I think it’s done and paste here then realize more work can be done. And when I edit them here, I have to have spaces or begin a whole new blog post because when I delete everything in the current one, the structure is still all messed up. We shouldn’t have all that extra work to post a poem. There are so many other glitches with this app and website too. It’s an ongoing issue for years no matter which phone I use. Sometimes it almost feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth, but I like having this space to share things. It’s different than regular social media, and sometimes my posts are too long to fit in a social media post. So I keep this around. I’m going to upgrade it when I get money. It feels kind of ironic that I’m complaining that something is more trouble than it’s worth and in the same breath saying I’m going to invest money in it to keep around lol)

Xoxo Kim 💋❤️