So you believe in ghosts?

“I’m going to visit my girlfriend in San Francisco tomorrow,” an old friend told me on the phone a few days ago. I called him about a technical question and after he answered it, our conversation had shifted to catching up on the details of each other’s lives.

“Girlfriend, huh?” I said. “I don’t think you’ve told me about her.”

“No, I haven’t.”

This is not surprising, as I have not seen him in almost a year, and only spoken to him on a handful of occasions since then, mostly about work.

But over the past five years or so, our friendship has seemingly reached an understanding and we are much closer than our correspondence reflects.

“Do you have some time?” he asked.

“I do.” (The heat was not working in my apartment and at this present moment I sat wrapped up in a hat, scarf, blanket and gloves on my couch waiting semi-patiently for my landlord.)

“Anything to get my mind off of this cold,” I said through frosted breath, thinking first about how troubling it is to be able to see your breath inside your home and then about how long of a story I had just agreed to listen to.

He launched into an elaborate account of meeting a girl on a Birth Right trip to Israel and slowly falling in love with her, overcoming odds, and ending up together. It was a very sweet story, and I could tell that he had told it before.

“Fell in love, eh?” I snapped, too harshly.

“Yeah,” he answered, unfazed.

“Sounds serious.”

He laughed. “It is.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s great,” he said, and I could tell that he meant it, his sincerity vastly overpowering my sarcasm.

“We’ve been living together for a few months, moved in together rather quickly. But she’s been visiting her family in San Francisco for the past few weeks, which feels like it’s been forever. I miss her, you know?”

“Sure,” I said, smiling now.

He was happy and I could hear it clearly in the tones of his voice. He talked about how his priorities have shifted since moving in with her. “These days, it’s basically how can I structure my life so I’m spending the most amount of time possible with this person. I’m not sure how to describe it,” he continued. “I guess it’s kind of like ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’”

“Not really.” I said.

His lack of response to my answer led me to believe that I had stepped on a rhetorical question.

“I think falling in love is like ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Some people do and some people don’t. Let’s say you do, so you say, ‘Yeah, I believe in ghosts.’ Non-believers ask you, ‘Well, have you ever seen one?’ and ‘How do you know what it looks like?’ And even if you say you really have seen one before, you say, ‘In college,’ then they repeat ‘How do you know that was a ghost?’ You follow?”

“Kind of.”

There was a pause that sounded for a second like he was annoyed at my confusion, but then he said clearly, “When I met this girl, it was like I was standing there, staring at a ghost right in front of me, saying to myself ‘Oh yeah, of course, I believe in ghosts, this is a ghost. And really, seeing one makes you think about all of the ghosts you thought you had seen before…. Most of the ones you thought might be ghosts, they weren’t.”

“But they exist,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

- Zachary Stuart-Pontier