Every year when the air turns and the light bruises a little earlier in the day,
I think of you.
Even though we never met.
Even though your name is mostly spoken in whispers or not at all.
Even though you’re a ghost in a house I never got to walk through.
You were twenty-seven.
Rebel-blooded. Cigarette-fingered.
The kind of woman who probably would’ve let me sneak a sip of wine at Christmas.
Who would’ve worn black eyeliner at family dinners just to piss off the conservative aunts.
You would’ve been the cool one.
The one who saw me — really saw me — before I even knew what I was becoming.
But you left.
After giving birth to my cousin.
Some people say it was hormones or the crash or
a momentary slip in the dark.
But I think the darkness had been building for years
and no one looked close enough to see it pooling behind your smile.
Especially not him.
The man I call uncle out of habit, not heart.
He made it harder.
Didn’t soften the edges when they started to cut.
Didn’t ask what the silence meant.
Didn’t stay awake the night you broke.
And now I’m left with
a mother I love but who carries her own kind of chaos —
the sharp-edged kind that cuts when she’s not looking.
And an uncle I avoid at holidays,
who walks around like your absence isn’t his ghost too.
Maybe it’s cruel,
but part of me blames him.
Not for the darkness —
but for never bringing a candle.
You did it at the park near the lake.
That spot with the rusted swings and the crooked bench
where the wind never feels warm, even in summer.
Where the trees lean in like they remember.
And every time I go back —
even for a walk, even for peace —
the air tastes like something unfinished.
It still feels haunted.
Not by you exactly,
but by the silence you left behind.
The scream no one heard until it was too late.
Mom told me you were the one who showed her Enya.
Now she plays it when she wants to remember you
without crying.
And me?
Sometimes I put it on late at night,
let the voice of another ghost hold me,
like maybe you’re just in the next room,
lighting another cigarette,
smiling at how dramatic I turned out.
You’d get it, I think.
You’d get me.
My cousin grew up in London.
He came back eventually — lived with my mom after I moved out.
We only got close once.
Moving his stuff out of her house,
box after box of a life I wasn’t really part of.
And I don’t know… I guess I thought we’d be something more.
That maybe you passed something soft down to him.
A little of your mischief, your depth, your ache.
But it never really felt like that.
Two messy relationships, a move to Atlanta, a stretch of silence.
Sometimes I wonder if I only imagined that you would’ve been different —
or if he just never got to know the parts of you that would’ve taught him how.
Either way, I still miss what I never had.
And what I wish he’d become.
I think about the photos that could’ve been —
me in a Halloween costume,
you pretending to steal my candy.
You teaching me how to flick a lighter without burning myself.
Rolling your eyes when I told you I was in love for the first time.
Calling me out when I started hiding how sad I really was.
You never got to be my safe place.
And I never got to be yours.
That’s the part that guts me.
September always feels like it’s holding its breath.
The kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself,
just lingers in corners like secondhand smoke.
I play Wake Me Up When September Ends on loop.
Not because it brings you back —
but because it lets me feel the ache without apology.
Because somewhere in those chords
is a version of you dancing barefoot in the kitchen,
and I’d give anything to sit at the counter and just be near it.
I miss you.
Even if I never knew you.
Even if all I’ve got is a name, a song,
and a haunted park bench by the lake
where the wind still carries your goodbye.
// Scorpio Veil
For the ghost who passed down Enya and cigarettes and the ache of being almost loved