Functionally speaking, Nadya’s studio apartment was an overpriced waiting area.
track Amazon packages, swipe profiles on dating apps, and check on her sent emails to make sure they got where they were going.
She used a screen divider she got from a friend to mimic the existence of multiple rooms. The idea of intentionally carving out a space for each messy area of her life felt like some kind of progress. At least her laundry pile and stack of books could remain separate while she decided where things were going.
A wave of practical minimalism had hit during the last few weeks before Nadya’s moving date. This helped her shed some of the things she could never quite fit into her scattered existence. She parted with film posters, pairs of sneakers, and pieces of furniture she once thought her ex would ask about.
No matter how much physical detritus she made disappear, Nadya still felt like there was so much she needed to leave behind. She just wanted to finally move forward after starting and stopping for nearly a decade, counting on different jobs and partners to tell her what to do. Now, she could actually give herself a shot to be comfortable on her own terms.
At first, the thumping sounds were easy to chalk up to the routine shuffling of apartment building residents, but her dog’s ears perked up when what sounded like murmuring in the walls kept stirring both human and tiny animal from sleep each night. Since Nadya had made her living space sparse by design, she couldn’t logically dismiss the sounds as the simple shifting of objects. Other than those murmurs in the night and the echoing of podcasts she played loudly during the day, her life’s soundtrack was essentially silence.
Nadya’s studio was on the third floor of her building, sandwiched between another apartment and the stairwell at the end of a long hallway. Her anxiety and tremendous capacity for imagining catastrophe had already led her to game out several ways a human, animal, or supernatural intruder could find her. Her compulsive generation of chaos scenarios was a function of both trauma and the tension she had always felt navigating the world in her body.
Due to a constant belief that bad things were on the way when she was alone, Nadya had taken several precautions. The bed faced the door so she could confront someone if they intruded upon her space. The breathable vibe she had created by only having a few pieces of furniture also allowed for many potential escape paths.
The one thing she hadn’t accounted for was supernatural company—a presence on which she may have intruded.
In addition to the noises, things had clearly been moving from one place to another. It started with her glasses not being where she’d left them one morning. She repeatedly found her dog’s leash on the floor even though she specifically remembered placing it back on the hook she had mounted for it next to the front door. These things could easily be folded into her tendency to blame herself for things being slightly askew. Disarray and disorganization were default states.
Nadya often drank coffee in the evenings and clicked play on Netflix shows at 3AM. Sleep had never been a steady thing for her. Coupled with loneliness, her inability to find harmony with the idea of rest made everything she ever decided easy to question. She simply told herself she had made certain decisions and simply forgotten what they were. The narrative of leashes and glasses shifting with the ebbs and flows of her persistent depression was an easy one.
If what she eventually suspected to be a ghost was trying to get noticed, her brain was playing hard-to-scare. Her ability to minimize the issue and lean into the idea of surrender brought her a strange sense of comfort. Otherwise, her anxiety might have swallowed her whole. Perhaps the idea of a threat she couldn’t see or quantify was simply too much to process.
The ghost didn’t do anything that would register as hostile. There was a disappointing lack of cryptic messages in the bathroom mirror fog created by Nadya’s lengthy showers; she was simply aware that she didn’t feel alone. As her days and nights blended into a single winding path of uncertainty, she found herself eager to detect more signs of this unknown presence. It was a potential pathway to connection that didn’t demand what other human beings had put her through.
Could a ghost roommate be something pleasant? Nadya hadn’t entertained the idea of living with someone other than a romantic partner in years. All she ever wanted was to know that someone else might be looking out for her well-being. This felt like a good compromise. It was something she wasn’t afraid would leave after promising too much.
The distance Nadya had created between herself and her family initially felt like a victory—and it was, according to her therapist—but the childhood impulse to call out for your parents when something goes bump in the night is one that’s only enhanced by the singular isolation of adulthood. When the ghost felt like it may have been violating the terms of their silent cohabitation agreement, Nadya felt the urge to drive until she reached her parents’ long driveway in the suburbs.
Staying away from other people had been a condition of the pandemic that no-one could afford to feel awful about anymore. Nadya remembered feeling as though people finally understood her default level of sadness when her social media feeds consisted exclusively of people mourning multiple losses. There was no more touch, eating at restaurants, getting a sugar high at the movies, or getting bored in someone else’s presence.
Nadya hadn’t been touched in a long time, which was why the sensation of the ghost’s hand on hers caused a stir.
She was eating the same eggs she always ate on a day that was definitely going to feel like all of the other days. While she sulked, scrolled, and hovered over the remnants of her meal, her dog’s gaze seemed to be trained on something positioned about five feet from where she sat. She realized this when the dog froze on his way to her chair. He typically sat beneath it with his nose perpendicular to the floor and waited for her to drop some food after reading a scary tweet.
Nadya felt a gust of cool air and then the particular sensation of someone’s skin grazing her knuckles. It was as if someone had brushed past her on their way to their seat on a train. Her head whipped around and she was overwhelmed with a powerful urge to follow the figure she had sensed down the imaginary aisle. Her imaginary world stretched further than 500 square feet for the first time in months.
Having a ghost roommate that only wanted some light hand-holding action in the early hours of the morning felt like something she could accept. Still, obsessive research was necessary before Nadya could be fully on board. Her browser tabs quickly became a crash course on all things supernatural. Most of what she found suggested that ghosts inhabit very old places. Her building was brand new, a pastel atrocity in a gentrified neighborhood.
Was this possibly a new ghost? Were there such things as new ghosts? Maybe this was a millennial ghost. There was so much Nadya didn’t know or want to know.
One day, she felt a familiar chill while putting off sending a work email. Since she needed an excuse to make an hour evaporate before her next Zoom call, she figured she’d substitute the ghost for the therapist she could barely face every week. She laid down on the trendy twin sized mattress she had purchased using an extremely specific code from a podcast promo and launched into a contemplative monologue.
“I don’t know who you are or if you even exist in the 3-5 ways we’re supposed to expect you to exist. My dog and I have been wondering about what you might be up to. I just wanted you to know that you can hang. I have no-one else in this bed on a regular basis and no-one next to me on the couch most nights. I’m only kind of picky about what’s playing on TV so feel free to dabble in some spontaneous channel switching. I don’t use overhead lighting so I apologize for the lack of solid opportunities to make lights flicker. Also, is that particular move still a thing? Maybe you’re just haunting me by hanging out on my phone and increasing my screen time. Anyway, this was nice. I have to go back to being me now. Thanks, ghost.”
One day, Nadya woke up and her laptop was on the floor. The dog’s leash was also moved but that was welcomed because she needed the reminder to get out of bed and walk him. The laptop thing was especially jarring because she noticed a document saved to her desktop that she hadn’t seen there the last time she was working. She took a deep breath and opened the file, fully expecting to see a picture of her soul being extracted but shot from an appealing angle with a flattering filter applied. The ghost definitely cared about stuff like that—or maybe death was the thing that could finally relieve us all of the need to chase likes on Instagram.
When Nadya opened the document, she saw a letter she had written to herself when she was at a particularly low point during her college years. She thought she had deliberately lost this when shedding an old external hard drive. The letter itself was about how she was going to overcome her loneliness, make films, travel, find love, and have the best dog ever. She had accomplished some of these things, a reality that felt overwhelmingly affirming at that moment.
Nadya realized she had come a much longer way than she ever let herself acknowledge. She developed a new theory that the ghost was just a previous version of herself that she’d left behind too quickly. Maybe she was calling herself back to something bigger than whatever apartment she happened to live in or which partner she had. She felt loved, not just by the ghost but by herself.
Nadya suddenly felt like she was so boring to her supernatural visitor. None of her furniture had any character or history. Her life looked as though it had only been unboxed and propped up just a few months ago, and this was by design. It was something she had mistaken for taste because her taste felt like nothing. There was no way she’d developed enough of a definitive personality to warrant a long-term haunting, especially one by a more passionate iteration of herself.
She decided to move on from courting her spooky guest. Now, all she wanted to do was let more things in.