Text 9:40 pm “It’s not the same without you [shrug emoji].”
Text 9:41 pm, Spotify link, “Tu Orgullo” [Your pride]
Text 9:42 pm, Spotify link, “Estoy Aquí” [I’m here]
Part of me wanted to type, are you fucking kidding me, after four years, still with this bullshit? What part of “we’re divorced” is not resonating with you? The other half of me knew that there was no possible way to reply. Every reply would be the wrong reply. To respond to the substance—really, my pride was the problem, you cheating bastard?—would be to invite more back and forth. (That our split was all about my pride was one of his constant refrains.) To remind him that I’d asked him to stop sending texts like these would bring the rejoinder that he knew that already, but couldn’t I see his true and beautiful love, a true and beautiful love that existed in and around the totally incidental cheating that went on sporadically ever since we got together when we were twenty-two? Couldn’t I see that he had given me every reason over decades to fight for him and for our relationship? What was wrong with me?
Text 10:37 pm, “I assume you will default to ghosting my comments, but really?”
People said ghosting was awful, my students complained about it as the worst behavior, but always in my head I’d think, really? Was that true? What if you’d told someone you wanted to end things, if you’d said, “Maybe I wasn’t clear, I want a divorce” and the person replied “I know you want a divorce. But you’re wrong”? What if you’d said, “I’d like us to stick to logistics, please” and the other person said, “I can’t help how your mixed messages make me feel, I’m only human”? And what if there was nothing at all you could ever say or write that wouldn’t be received as a mixed message conveying your secret desire to get back together? If the other person made it clear that no matter how many times you flapped your lips or typed your lines that they just weren’t going to pay any attention at all to what you’d said unless it matched up with what they’d already decided they wanted you to say—was it really so wrong to ghost them? It had always seemed to me that the message was pretty clear. When someone ghosted you, it meant they didn’t want to talk to you anymore. They weren’t being ambiguous. They weren’t being difficult, or coy. They were being beautifully, crystally clear: I do not want to talk with you any longer. And maybe that hurt, and maybe that was painful, but was it dishonest? Was it wrong, especially if someone tried to talk and the other person just didn’t listen?
Text 1:07 am, “I know my notes are very up to the recipient. They could be read as a very romantic committed sign of love or they can be read as a pathetic creepy clinger.”
Or stalker. They could be read as a fucking stalker who was going to show up at my door and force his way in and strangle me because I wouldn’t, couldn’t understand the purity of his love. And did I give it 90/10 or better odds against? I did. And was that reassuring? Not particularly, especially when I considered how much bigger he was, when I thought back to how we used to wrestle over the pillows in bed and he would pin me down. When I thought of the flowers, which he never bought when we were together but came in hordes after our divorce, when I thought of messages like this four years on, when I thought of all the times with all the co-parenting therapists when I’d said, “please stop,” and none of it had stopped. So when my friends told me I should just send him a satirical song in reply—maybe Meghan Traynor’s “No” or Dua Lipa’s “IDGAF” or something else to really get the message across—I couldn’t help but think, yeah, but what if I end up dead? Because I’d sent the message, and he’d got the message, and his response was….
Text, 2:21 am, “I miss you.”
It was like I was a ghost, with no voice, no substance, no self, like I’d said nothing at all.
Image by ADMC from Pixabay – A grey smartphone with lots of app badges on the screen
literally stories 
Loved this. Seemed so real. And subtle and frightening. Well done.
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Very clever and I didn’t see the end coming with the kind of Sixth Sense reveal, and then this makes the justified anger of the narrator all the more poignant and sad.
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Margaret
Glad to see your work up on the site this morning. Although stuff changes people stay pretty much the same: anyone can change, but few do. Used to have to go abroad to ghost someone. Actually that sounds better than sitting in the dark; but it certainly costs more.
Good work.
Leila
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Disturbing and sad but very well constructed – a black tale for Black Friday!
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Very unsettling – the modern world seems to hold more threat than the ancient one but actually it’s all the same stuff in different clothing and the threat to women – smaller and weaker hasn’t diminished. This tone of this was excellent, I thought, and the desperation and fear palpable. Well done. Thank you – dd
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This left me gasping. There is a specific, physical feeling I get when someone is attempting to gaslight me—it’s as though all the breath in my lungs has been sucked out. The last line of this story really articulates that feeling for me—“It was like I was a ghost, with no voice, no substance, no self, like I’d said nothing at all.”
Whew. What a gut punch.
Thank you for this really frightening story.
Jennifer
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This was powerful. Puts a person in the perspective of that “Ghost” out there who won’t respond. I liked the part, “they just weren’t going to pay any attention at all to what you’d said unless it matched up with what they’d already decided they wanted you to say—” So much truth in this story. The early morning text were dramatic and creepy. Great ending, too!
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The inner monologue coveys the intensity and emotion effectively. Time for a restraining order.
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Margaret
The relentless grind and recursiveness of social media were displayed nicely, as was the age-old compulsion some people have to require distance or separation in order to love — or think they do. Very well done. Thanks! — Gerry
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Margaret
You established an entire, realistic, lifelike, fraught situation in a very few words, or brush strokes: fabulous and awesomely done!…In the old days, folks would have to use pen and paper and send their messages round via secret messenger in the middle of the night, or tip-toe over there themselves and deposit the missive in the hedge rows or at the front of the house where someone else other than the intended recipient might more easily locate it first…now we can bombard one another 24/7 with electronic blips…one wonders why this character doesn’t just use the “block this person’s messages” tool that has also been invented and comes with the phones, then one remembers that the main character is actually afraid of physical violence from the other end, so of course they would want to know what the other one’s up to…I also wondered how reliable the main character’s fear and point of view were…were they actually afraid of being murdered by the ex-spouse, was this a primordial, paranoid vision of fear, had the ex ever perpetrated violence before and beyond the pillow fights, or would the “strangle me to death” scenario come straight out of left field, because the texts being sent seemed more endlessly annoying and simply pathetic than potentially violent…and these were all good questions, because it speaks to the complexity and paradox and paranoia that all add up to “modern life” presented in this story…great work! A thought-provoking tale with a high relatability factor. It also steps outside itself and makes the reader think about how strange the modern world really is, behavior that’s taken for “normal” by almost everyone is actually half mad, quite mad, or maybe even all-the-way, straight-up insane…a subtle horror story, old-fashioned romance gone sour permanently in the demented fantasy that is the modern world of what we once called “human beings”?….
Dale
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Glad it is fiction (if it is). Looks like everything that needs to be said has been said in earlier comments.
Old man holds out against singular “they”.
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Hi Margaret.
I don’t think we should use terms like delusional, controlling, manipulative and guilt tripping when we are talking about a relationship. They are all unacceptable and should be simply categorised as illegal!
As others have already mentioned, those last two lines were superb!
All the very best.
Hugh
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Becoming a ghost – so ironic in this situation….he doesn’t know her, or see her. I wonder what message the narrator sent…unless becoming a ghost was the message. Obviously, it’s his pride that’s hurt, not hers. He’s talking about himself. Yes, this could escalate, if the person feels disrespected, that’s what makes it pretty scary.
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