Tina and Matthew — Ghosts

It took Tina several days to decide whether to bring it up. The confession felt dangerous—not because it involved secrets, but because it involved memory, and she had spent years trying to bury that part of her past under work, purpose, and control.

When she finally wrote to Matthew, it wasn’t planned. It came after a long evening of unfinished work and cold tea, the kind of night that left her both accomplished and lonely. The cursor blinked on the screen, patient and relentless.

Tina: “There’s something you should know about me. I write about healing, but I’m not there yet. Not completely.”

She pressed send before she could talk herself out of it and then, with quiet resolve, began to type again.

Tina: “Years ago, someone I loved disappeared from my life without a word. One day, he was there; the next, he was gone. No explanation, no closure. Just silence.”

Her eyes unfocused as she stared at the screen, the words pulling old memories to the surface like fragments of a film she couldn’t stop watching.

Tina: “I wrote about him on my blog. I never said his name, but he was behind everything I published for a long time—every reflection on love, every piece on trust and loss. People called me brave. But I wasn’t healing; I was intellectualizing the pain so I could bear it.”

She paused, hesitating over what she had never told anyone outside those buried posts.

Tina: “Even now, I look for him online sometimes. Last week, actually. He’s still a ghost—still refusing to leave digital traces. He was always private, almost obsessively so. Even when we were together, he made sure he couldn’t be found. No photos, no posts, nothing. A man who built walls around himself and somehow let me in... but only for a while.”

A bittersweet smile tugged at her lips.

Tina: “I always found it ironic. I lived my life out loud, writing about everything, and he lived his life like a secret. Maybe that’s why he was drawn to me—or maybe that’s why he left.”

Then she added something she had never shared publicly, the one artifact she still kept close.

Tina: “He gave me a book once. It was a gift, simple but personal. On the first page, he’d written in his handwriting: ‘Thank you Tina. Love [his name], June 2012.’ Just that. No explanation, no flourish. I still have it. Sometimes I take it off the shelf and look at those words—at the shape of his letters, the way the ink has faded just slightly around the edges. It reminds me that he was real, that it all really happened.”

She hesitated, her cheast tightening.

Tina: “Because sometimes I question it. Whether he ever truly loved me, or if I imagined the depth we had. But when I look at that inscription, I know I didn’t make it up. For those times, at least, we were real.”

Her next message came minutes later:

Tina: “He moved a while ago. I found out last week—it was the reason I searched for him again. A new house, another neighborhood. Just seeing that was enough to shake me. He’s still moving forward, still mastering invisibility, while a part of me still stands in the same place he left me.”

She sent it before the hesitation could stop her. The relief came not from being understood but from no longer holding the secret alone.

Matthew’s reply appeared half an hour later.

Matthew: “I remember those old posts. The way you wrote about heartbreak—honest but controlled. I thought they were essays, not confessions.”

Tina: “They were him. Every word. I thought writing about my pain made me strong, but I think it just preserved it.”

Matthew: “Maybe that’s what ghosts do,” he wrote. “They grow larger the more silent they stay. You gave him permanence because he gave you no ending.”

It hit her with the precision of truth.

Tina: “Yes. I filled the silence with meaning and then called it love.”

Matthew’s next question came softly, almost as if he were afraid to touch a bruise.

Matthew: “Do you still want answers from him? Or just proof that you weren’t imagining it?”

Tina: “Both, I think. I know he won’t come back. But sometimes I still need proof. That handwriting, the words in that book—they remind me that he was there, once. That I was seen.”

Matthew: “That’s not weakness, Tina. That’s what memory does—it holds on until it feels safe to let go.”

She didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she looked across the room at the bookshelf where the book sat, its spine worn, its pages still smelling faintly of paper and time. That single page—Thank you Tina. Love [his name], June 2012—had become her evidence against self-doubt. Proof that for a while, what she felt was mutual and alive.

Her final message flickered onto his screen not long after.

Tina: “I’m still learning how to let someone meet me where I’m not strong. Maybe I’m also learning that ghosts never really disappear—they just fade into the things they leave behind.”