What It’s Like to Love Someone with Anxiety – Told as a Beautiful Ghost Story

We have got to talk about the kids in all those Goosebumps books

For example, if your family vacation is to an amusement park called “HorrorLand”

and your station wagon explodes in the parking lot upon arrival,

maybe shrugging it off, buying an extra-large popcorn,

and heading directly to the Deadly Doom Slide is not your best possible course of action.

If you steal a weird camera from your creepy neighbor’s basement,

and all the pictures you take show bad things happening, like decapitation and also Tofurkey,

and then all the bad things from all the pictures start happening, stop taking pictures.

If you move into your new house, and there are a bunch of small children already living in your bedroom that your parents cannot see,

maybe don’t just grab a juice box and go to play in the cemetery that is in your backyard.

When I tell you about the ghosts that live inside my body, when I tell you I have a cemetery in my backyard

and in my front yard and in my bedroom,

when I tell you that trauma is a steep slide you cannot see the bottom of,

that my anxiety is a camera that shows everyone I love as bones.

When I tell you that panic is a stubborn phantom,

that she will grab onto me and not let go for months,

this is the part of the story when everyone is telling you to run.

To love me is to love a haunted house.

It’s fun to visit once a year, but no one wants to live there,

and when you say “tell me about the bad days,”

Sounds like all the neighborhood kids daring each other to ring the doorbell and you love me,

like the family walking through HorrorLand, holding hands

You are not stupid or careless or even brave, you’ve just never seen the close-up of a haunting

Darling, this love will not cure me,

and this love will not scrape the blood from the baseboards, but it will turn all the lights on

It will bring basil back from the farmer’s market, and it will plant it in every windowsill

It is the kind of love that gives me goosebumps

When you say to the ghost, “If you’re staying, then you better make room,”

and we kiss against the walls that tonight are not shaking,

so we turn the music up, and we dance to Miles Davis

We turn the music up and we dance to Miles Davis and you say,

“My God, this house, the way that it stands even on the months that no one goes into or comes out of it, how reckless”

The way that I love the first chapter of a ghost story,

like a gentle hand reaching out of a grave.