The Ghost Who Writes

I’ve been watching Peaky Blinders. Tommy Shelby doesn’t blink. He doesn’t flinch. He speaks like every word is pre-approved by death itself. And I realized why: he thinks he died in the tunnels. He’s not surviving. He’s posthumous. Everything from here is an echo.

I get that.

Not because I’ve fought in a war—but because I’ve lived long enough to bury too many people, too many versions of myself. I’ve walked out of hospitals where my mother was declared dead. I’ve seen my father in a hospital bed with machines breathing for him. I’ve scraped shit out of his apartment when he couldn’t. I’ve held dead dogs. Sat through funerals. Packed up apartments. Said I love you to someone in one moment and felt them vanish in the next. I’ve felt that switch flip. And once it flips, it doesn’t unflip.

You become someone who knows what death actually looks like. Not the cinematic kind. Not the metaphor. The real thing. The rot. The silence. The paperwork. The way everyone moves on like it’s another Tuesday.

And when you’ve seen enough of that, something inside you breaks in half. One part keeps going. The other part sits down in the dirt and doesn’t move again.

So now I write. Not because I think it’s noble or because I have something to prove. I write because it’s the only thing I know how to do that feels real. I write because I don’t want to make small talk anymore. I write because I’ve run out of patience for people who say "everything happens for a reason" or "just stay positive." That’s children’s theater. I want reality.

I write from the dead side of the room. From the cold spot. From the voice inside your head at 3 a.m. asking if it’s always going to feel like this. I write for the people who’ve lost too much to pretend. For the ones who stopped trying to win approval and just want to survive with a little dignity. For the ones who keep showing up because they haven’t figured out how to disappear yet.

I don’t care about being understood anymore. I care about telling the truth. I care about blood-level honesty. About sentences that taste like iron. About reminding the living that they’re still breathing.

That’s what ghosts do. We whisper from the other side.

And maybe if you listen closely enough, you’ll remember what it feels like to be alive.