I’m haunted by the best kind of ghost, the type that lives in between drops of rain and among grains of sand, the type that never leaves your side. “Who are you?” she asks me, and I ask myself.

The ocean is gleaming with sex appeal, it’s waves turning over the sand of an eternal shore. Who am I? Am I the girl on her phone with a million followers and no friends? Am I the buff jogger with a shaved head and shaved arms? Or am I the abandoned ice cream, slowly melting away on the asphalt?

No, I’m the man sprawled on the beach and the only one who still has their shoes on. I feel every grain, every living thing, and then nothing at all. There’s something that’s not quite complete, leaving me like an untitled poem.

I wriggle my toes inside my sand-filled shoes as the homeless man talks to me on the metro. Through the window behind me I can see a purgatorial fog. The city is clenched like a fist. “Why would she leave me like that?” the homeless man asks me and her and God.

“I’m myself — always have been! Why doesn’t she love me? I’m just trying to work on myself. I’m not crazy!” No, I’m the homeless man. Why did she leave me? I just have to work on myself. I’m not going crazy!

I’m not sure how to respond to myself so I give myself a ten-dollar bill. “You need this more than I do,” the homeless man says to me as he returns the money. Maybe he can see that I’m haunted — so haunted that I’ll be back to where it started, that I’ll soon be obliterated into a million grains of sand and sinking into the ground.

The ghost is still there next to me. She’s both rotting and alive. She’s both an infant and a woman bleeding out in the bathtub of a hotel room. The ghost smiles and I remember her and that smile for what they used to be. I can see her outline in a downpour, imagine her fingers resting between mine, hear the whispering of a last goodbye, smell the sea salt on her neck. “Who am I?” I ask the ghost. She throws her head back with laughter. I laugh too as we sink together.

# # #

Matt Gaydos is a Colombian-American writer living in Los Angeles. He is currently pursuing a B.A. in English at Loyola Marymount University. When he’s not writing, he’s usually channelling his neuroticism into tweets about music and basketball.

Photo: Emily Morter