Haunted by the feelings I buried
It’s November once again.
On its first day, I found myself sitting alone in my room, staring blankly into its familiar emptiness, as though the walls might tell me what to do with the ache I could not name.
They say November is a month for ghosts.
Is that the reason why tonight feels different?
The darkness has filled every corner of my room, yet somehow, I can still see the glimmer of his eyes. A memory of his smile slips through the cracks of my thoughts. Even the shape of his lips returns to me with an almost unbearable clarity.
I wonder if this is what it means to be haunted — not to see something that is gone, but to feel something you have spent so long pretending was never there.
I buried it quietly.
Somewhere between ordinary conversations and stolen glances, between moments I told myself meant nothing and silences I thought meant everything, I began digging a grave for a feeling that had never asked to be born.
I thought the earth would keep it.
I was wrong.
Feelings are strange things. The more carefully you bury them, the deeper their roots grow. They find their way through the smallest cracks, reaching for light even when you have spent months teaching them to live in darkness.
And now, here I am, listening to the roots beneath me.
I do not know whether to pull them out or let them grow.
There is a certain cruelty in standing at the edge of a door, hand resting on the knob, knowing that either choice will change the room forever. I could open it and finally see what waits on the other side.
Or I could leave it closed.
Pretend I never heard anything knocking.
So I remain here, suspended between courage and cowardice, between the life where I say something and the one where I say nothing at all.
Because there is another ghost I am afraid of.
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Someone who might come after me.
Someone who might arrive at the door I was too frightened to open and find it already unlocked. Someone who might hear the music in him that I have spent so long pretending not to notice. Someone who might become the reason his eyes sparkle, the reason he stays a little longer, the reason he finally chooses to remain somewhere I was too afraid to ask him to stay.
And maybe that is the part I cannot admit.
I am not afraid of losing something that was mine.
I am afraid of watching someone else become the keeper of something I was too afraid to reach for.
So I keep burying it.
Deeper this time.
Under November nights, under unsent words, under every almost and every maybe.
But the strange thing about the dead is that they do not always stay dead.
Sometimes, they return as memories.
Sometimes, as dreams.
And sometimes, they look like a familiar pair of eyes glowing quietly in the dark.
Tonight, I think I finally understand the horror of November.
It is not that the ghosts come back.
It is that some things were never truly buried in the first place.
when November comes again next year, I wonder —
will I still be here,
standing over the same grave,
pretending I cannot hear something beneath the earth
still calling his name?
