Undead

Not all ghosts are dead.

Some still send Christmas cards in careful cursive, their forgiveness implied but never asked for. Some sit across from you at dinner and smile with the kind of grace that only memory can mistake for mercy. Some still have a key to your door. Some still bow their heads and pray for you with the same hands that molded your shame.

The worst kind of haunting doesn’t rattle windows or whisper in empty halls. It teaches you how to wear stillness. How to disappear without leaving. How to sit through the pain of your own voice and call it peace. It is a ghost that straightens your spine, slips intp the pauses between your words, stares back at you through mirrors that refuse to blink.

You were taught silence and told it was reverence. They said protection when they meant possession. They called your questions rebellion and your doubts betrayal. And they spoke it all in a language so holy, so familiar, you mistook it for truth. They made you afraid of your own sound. Told you love means swallowing the scream. And you did.

Again.

And again.

Until you no longer recognized yourself without the muzzle.

You tried to be good. You tried. You rewrote yourself in their image. You ironed the fire out of your voice. You spoke only in offerings. You made your rage into rhythm. Your grief into gospel. Your fear into silence so polished they called it wisdom.

But they never stopped watching. And you never stopped performing.

And now, when joy visits, it finds you apologetic. When pride stirs in your chest, it fights for breath. You still check your brightness against their shadow. Still weigh yourself against their approval. And when it doesn’t measure up, you tuck yourself back into that familiar shape. The one that fit in their hands.

The one they could bless and still control.

You don’t miss them. You miss the fantasy. The promise that if you behaved, you’d be held. That if you kneeled properly, you’d be loved.

But not all ghosts are dead. Some are still alive and smiling. Still rewriting what happened in tones so sweet you doubt your own memory. Still calling what they did love.

And you, you are still exorcising them.

You are still pulling their hands off your throat, scratching their hymns out of your ears. Still relearning how to speak. Still weaving together a voice they spent years unraveling.

They called your truth a storm, your voice a danger. But it wasn’t your truth that broke the room. It was their silence, their shame, their refusal to listen unless you bled quietly.

So now, you speak.

Not perfectly. Not brilliantly. But you speak.

Because salvation built on silence is just hell with manners.

But this one, you bury by telling the truth. With your whole voice. Without apology.