Hey.
It’s me.
The ghost haunting your one-bedroom Queens apartment.
Yeah, so, I know I usually keep to the hall closet where you store the vacuum you don’t use enough; or to the inside of the walls, where I bang on rusty pipes and make sighing noises; or, that one time, to the medicine cabinet, so that you saw me in the mirror when you got out of the shower and wiped the steam away and screamed and then almost fainted. But I’ve materialized in front of you today for something much more important than parlor tricks, Patricia.
That’s right. Your utter lack of anything close to housekeeping. And I mean like utter lack.
This is a goddamn intervention.
This place smells like someone swallowed a fart, let it ferment for three weeks, then burped it back up. I know you’re still all excited about post-pandemic life and being able to go out again—you’re joining friends for brunch, you met that one guy on Tinder and brought him home and then just as you two got naked in the stained sheets you haven’t washed for months I whispered his name in his ear but he was looking at your face and clearly you didn’t say it so he freaked out hard and then left—you were cooped up so long, here, with me, and now you want to enjoy living la vida loca again.
Oh, is that a dated reference?
Sorry.
It’s hard to keep up with cultural trends when you’re a ghost haunting a one-bedroom Queens apartment that could really use a Febreze hose-down.
Actually, you know what? Skip the Febreze. That would be like pissing on a house fire. Throw everything that can’t be dunked in bleach out by the curb. Let the rats raise their young in your heap of offal until the city workers show up to haul it away, holding their noses and saying, Jesus Christ is there a goddamn dead body somewhere in here holy fuck I need a new job.
Anywho. Patricia. You don’t even shut the kitchen cabinets. You don’t even try. Like, who’s the ghost here? Who’s supposed to be opening cabinet doors? And then slamming them? And then opening them again? I’ll give you a hint, Patricia: Not you.
And I didn’t want to bring this up, because really, I didn’t want to embarrass you. But. But. I know the underwear you’re wearing right now is three days’ dirty. THREE. Because three days ago you ran out of clean laundry, and what did you do when faced with that domestic dilemma, Patricia? Did you fill your coat pocket with quarters and head down to the laundromat with your bulging hamper, like a fucking normal person?
No.
You just shrugged and recycled a pair of crusty granny panties from the hamper. And Patricia? You’re a little ripe.
Like, portable-toilet-on-a-hot-day-full-of-drunk-concertgoers’-puke ripe.
Listen to me, though, going on and on. But this isn’t about me, Patricia. It’s not about you, even—not really. It’s about us. Us, here. Your life. My afterlife. Together, in this one-bedroom Queens apartment that has become nothing more than a cockroach fuckshack.
Because while you can go out and party like it’s 1999—and I was there in ’99, Patricia, and it was a party—I can’t. I can’t leave this apartment, and I think you know that, or you should know that; it’s a pretty standard ghost fact, like it’s basically common knowledge, but then again you apparently don’t know how to operate the dollar-store toilet brush that I guess you bought when you were in an optimistic mood, so. Who knows?
Anyway.
If you don’t spend at least a little time cleaning up this weekend, I swear to God, Patricia, I will double down on the haunting. My handsome-but-transparent face will be the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night. I’ll be all over you like stink on—well, like the stink that’s already on you, but we don’t need to go over that again, do we?
Being stuck in this cesspit makes me want to kill myself.
But Patricia, as a ghost haunting your one-bedroom Queens apartment, I can’t do that, since I’m already dead. So you can see how my only choice was to concentrate my energy enough to become at least partially solid and confront you, here, today, in your living room. In our living room, where—Jesus, Patricia, is that a human dump in the corner?
This is just too much.
Neither life nor death prepared me for this.
Because—and admitting this doesn’t feel good, but it’s important for me to be vulnerable with you so you know you can talk to me, though since I started sharing my thoughts with you about all of this, you’ve stayed pretty quiet, maybe because I’m the ghost haunting your one-bedroom Queens apartment and you’re scared shitless, which would be understandable—ghosts have fears, too.
And do you know what mine is? My biggest one? The one that keeps me up at night, and the fact that I don’t sleep isn’t important right now?
It’s you having a terrible accident in this shit-heap, like slipping on one of the sixteen fast-food wrappers on your bedroom floor, banana-peel-style, and impaling yourself on that ugly wrought-iron lamp, and dying. Because if you die in this apartment, here, with me, and if you do not move on to whatever world comes next—one where dumbass angels play dumbass harps or hellfire burns the short-hairs off people’s ballsacks, but how should I know, because I didn’t get a ticket to either fucking one—then this cursed afterlife becomes eternal for us both, Patricia. Long. Endlessly long. Like the rope of Yeti hair that you could pull out of the bathroom sink if it ever occurred to you to do so.
Alrighty. I think that about covers it. And I feel better. Do you feel better?
It’s fine. Take your time. When you want to talk, I’ll be here.
Since, you know, I can’t leave.
Like, ever.
Patricia?