I have always been infatuated with dead things. With butterflies pinned in glass cases. With the decay of flowers, roses in particular. Since she passed, I seem to have started loving my grandmother more. I keep these things close - carrying her photograph in my wallet, pressing autumn leaves in my journals and keeping bouquets long past their due dates. I stare at the corpses of small birds, for longer than what is considered normal, with an enchanted fascination. And of course, cemeteries have an intoxicating allure. I could not tell you exactly why I am this way. I could, however, tell you that I find a sort of peace in their stillness and a drunkenness when remembering them.

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Something has come about, though, that I am not quite in love with. A sort of death, that I cannot acquire a taste for. This death is my own. I have died. I am a dead thing. Well, technically I am still alive. I have a heart that still pumps blood. I have lungs that still suck in air. I have limbs that are warm, although my feet are quite cold, and I have all of the technical requirements for something to be considered “living”. But I don’t feel alive. I don’t thoroughly register touch. I look in the mirror, not quite grasping that the reflection is my own. I have been overcome with a sort of aimlessness, wandering about without any clear awareness of my existence.

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I would like to romantically proclaim that I am a ghost. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Ghosts, for example, have the ability to haunt things. Instead, I am being haunted. I am a haunted ghost, how bitterly ironic. I am harrowed, forced even, to bear witness to uncomfortable flashes of fragmented events playing in my mind. Unwanted hands crawling over fleshy curves. Manipulative lips pressing to an unresponsive mouth. I smell an unpleasant breath beneath my nose. I hear “no” and “please” ring in my ears a thousand times. I experience surrender. Submission. Succumbing. I draw from these memories, like pulling my drowning head from hot and cold water. I shake. I chase my breath, barely catching it. I sit, as I have been sitting for the past hour, lifelessly, drunkenly. Not the poetic, beautiful drunk. The sick, sombre drunk which throbs and nauseates a realisation into place. I have been robbed of my ability to experience touch, by armed fingertips cutting over my flesh. I have been robbed of the worth of my words, by deaf pleas bulldozing over them. I have been robbed of the ownership of my body, by another pressing and weighing down, smothering it into yielding. My mouth and tongue are not my own. They are knotted to another that is rancid with lust. My breasts now refuse to find pleasure in being gently kissed and cupped with care. My skin responds irritably to soft caresses. I feel nothing between my legs. My thighs are dead and my stomach is numb. I have never kissed death, but he has kissed me.

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But when did I die? The first time? The last? Somewhere in-between? No matter, I am now a dead thing. I am a phantom. I am an apparition. I only appear in a two-dimensional state. The electrons traveling through my nervous-system, do so at a low drum. My bones are hollow and so are my teeth. I am a ghost, an unromantic spirit, and, unlike dried flowers and black-and-white photographs, am unsentimental in my state of existence.