Ghost Images

Perhaps it isn't my fault my mother is a ghost. Perhaps it is not my fault that she walks around this apartment as her faded self, an afterimage of a photograph that I cannot realize is the present day, our present existence. I do not think it is my fault entirely. She is not well. She is not herself as she once was, if she was ever well. Perhaps I was just too much of a child to think of my mother that way. But it is all that I have known. I cannot help but feel both frustration and so much sadness at her. Not because she cannot grasp my life, what I told her all those months ago, this distance, the truth of the world . . . but because I think she is so sad inside, so tormented, and I cannot help her. I love her. But I think I have killed her. I really think I have.