Member-only story
I’m Addicted to Heartbreak
I only fall for the ones who will become ghosts.
My life is like a haunted house, and my mind is the attic filled with cobwebs and the permeating smell of dusty pages. No one dares to climb the rickety stairs up that always creak on the fourth and seventh steps. Someone could easily fall through to their demise. It’s best that no one lurks up there.
But me? I sit up there all the time, just leafing through the diaries of past decades. Even now, one journal sits unfinished, the last entry written in purple ink. It was as if I thought the words, if written like a spell, would banish the last ghost from my thoughts forever.
It would be so much easier that way, wouldn’t it?
Some ghosts like to revisit this place I keep sacred just for them — but others don’t visit at all. The last one is like that. He likes to pretend he’s still one of the living, but I know better. I saw past the facade. I almost called him out on it. But instead I kept him as a stranger, enough distance between us that I could easily shrug him off as if he were an ill-fitting jacket.
They never embrace me back. I’ve learned not to get hurt by it. I’ve come up with coping mechanisms for every smattering of heartache. The words become potions, sleeping draughts, and moonshine ambrosia nicked from the…
