Morphine Ghost

Why has she chosen me? Are there others she is somehow also menacing? I tell myself there must be. There has to be. No one could endure that impossible attention alone.  If she follows others, she leaves no evidence that they survived long enough to speak about it. Sometimes I convince myself I am only imagining her, that exhaustion and fear have finally hollowed out my mind. Then something changes where I know I did not leave it, or I wake with the certainty that someone stood over my bed for hours without breathing. If she has chosen others, I pray she keeps them. If she has chosen only me, then I have already been alone far longer than I realized.

She stands and watches me while I lie in bed. She has haunted me this way for years. I have never seen her move, not once, yet every night she is standing somewhere different when I dare to look. Some nights she waits in the bedroom doorway, her face hidden by the darkness beyond the hall. Other nights she is only a silhouette beside the window, where no reflection should exist. I learned long ago that pretending to sleep is safer than acknowledging her, but she is patient beyond anything human. I can feel her gaze lingering until dawn, as though she is waiting for me to make a single mistake—to open my eyes too long, to whisper her name, or simply to believe that she isn't really there. Every morning she is gone, leaving only the certainty that she never once looked away.

Even when they filled me with chemicals, making me numb to every thing around, she was there watching. The drugs slowed my thoughts until the world became a blur of white ceilings and muffled voices, but they could never erase her. She remained perfectly clear, standing just beyond the reach of the nurses, waiting with the same silent patience she always has. They believed the medicine had quieted my mind. They never understood that it only made it harder for me to warn them she was already in the room.