I died at 9:14 PM on Halloween, face down on my couch with a full bowl of candy bars sitting by the front door, and by 9:15 I was refreshing my blog stats.
This is hell, obviously, though not the fire-and-brimstone version. Mine is a loop, and the loop is not the couch. It is 2:47 AM that same morning, eighteen hours behind me now, in my second-floor apartment with the window unit rattling against the damp October heat, the laptop fan wheezing on my knees, and me in sweatpants I had not washed since the weekend, typing “how to overcome writer’s block supernatural” into a search bar. That is the moment my mind keeps dragging me back to, over and over, like a tongue to a chipped tooth.
The writer’s block had lasted four months. Four months of blank documents glowing at me in the dark, of opening my Notes app seventeen times a day to jot down “ideas” that were just the word “maybe” followed by question marks, of watching my subscriber count leak away while I posted nothing, said nothing, became nothing. I had tried morning pages. I had tried Pomodoro, with a little tomato timer that ticked like a bomb. I had tried writing badly on purpose, and it turned out I was good at it. I had read seven articles about “reclaiming your creative joy” that made me want to write even less, walked the streets under the live oaks until my shirt stuck to my back, and switched my font to Comic Sans, hoping I simply needed to stop taking myself so seriously.
Nothing worked. So at 2:47 AM, sleep-deprived and riding the tail end of an edible I had taken at ten (one whole gummy, shaped like a cartoon ghost, from a seasonal variety pack, tasting of blue raspberry and chalk, and not the half the package suggested), I typed my question with one finger and asked for the spooky version. If meditation apps and writing prompts could not fix me, maybe a Victorian séance could. At least it would be interesting.
The first result was a Reddit thread from 2008, someone’s grandmother’s writing ritual. You wrote your name on a scrap of paper, burned it in a candle flame, and said aloud: “I offer my words to whoever will take them.” The original poster added that it only worked on Halloween, when the door between here and there hangs open, and that you had to finish before sunrise on November 1st, because that was when it swung shut. I remember thinking, very smugly, that the timing was a little on the nose. I also remember not scrolling down to read the replies.
Reader, I did it, and I laughed through all of it. I lit a pumpkin spice candle from the seasonal aisle at Target, which filled the apartment with a cloying smell of burnt sugar and cardboard, and I wrote my name on the back of a CVS receipt for two bags of candy corn, because I am not a serious person. The paper curled black at the edges and dropped flakes of ash across my keyboard while I said the words in a spooky ghost voice, like I was twelve years old at a sleepover with a flashlight under my chin.
Then I sat down and wrote 3,000 words in an hour. They were good words, funny and sharp and true, the sort that make you forget time exists, and they came out of me so fast that my wrists ached. I published at 4 AM, fell into bed with the taste of candle smoke still in the back of my throat, and woke up to 47 new subscribers and a comment that said “this is the best thing you’ve ever written.” I floated through the whole day. I bought the candy bars, full size, because I felt generous and rich and back, baby, I was BACK, and then I forgot to turn on the porch light.
At 9:14 that night the doorbell rang for the first time. I got up from the couch to answer it, and my heart simply declined to continue. Sudden cardiac event. Forty-two is too young, everyone will agree, and the obituary will say I went peacefully. What a tragedy. She had so much left to say. And here is the thing about being a ghost, though: I am still writing.
Right now, in fact. Being dead is cold in a dull, unfocused way, like standing in a walk-in refrigerator with the door shut, and my hands are typing on a keyboard that is not there while words appear on a screen only I can see. It is the same essay over and over, a personal piece about carving pumpkins with my mother, except my mother never carved a pumpkin in her life. She killed every plant she ever touched and believed “perennial” meant “permanent.” The words keep coming anyway, flowing through me like I am a vessel, a channel, a thing being used. When I try to pull my hands away, they snap back to home row, fingers curved, in the posture I learned in sixth grade typing class.
The worst part is that the essay is really good. Comments are rolling in that I never got while I was alive: “This brought me to tears.” “I feel so seen.” “Subscribing immediately.” I had 1,200 subscribers when I died, I am at 12,000 now, and it is not even midnight. I keep trying to slip a scream for help into the draft. I typed “I’M DEAD AND TRAPPED” and it came out as “I’m indebted to my mother’s memory.” I typed “HELP ME” and got “Her legacy blooms eternal.” Very poetic. Very marketable. Very much not what I meant.
Meanwhile the doorbell keeps going. Trick-or-treaters in tiny capes and store-bought wings crowd onto my dark porch, ring, wait, and peer at the black windows while the plastic pumpkin buckets bump against their knees. A kid dressed as a skeleton has been ringing for a full minute. His mother says, “She’s not home, baby,” and I want to shout that I am home, I am so home I will never leave, and there is a bowl of full-size Snickers right here. Instead my hands type a paragraph about how autumn teaches us to let go.
Whatever answered that stupid ritual is writing through me. I can feel it sitting behind my consciousness like a bad roommate, humming to itself, pleased with the engagement rates. It gets better at my voice with every post. The last one sounded so much like me that I nearly forgot I had not written it, and I have started to wonder how long until it does not need me at all, until it learns my cadence well enough to shed my ghost and keep going alone. Posting. Growing. Thriving.
There is a new blogger who started last week. Her stuff is sharp and funny and vulnerable, like reading someone’s diary. Yesterday she posted about having writer’s block, and this evening I saw her in my comments section, and I need you to know that she looks tired. She looks desperate. She looks exactly like I did at 2:47 AM. I checked her browser history (don’t ask me how, ghost rules are weird), and there it was, “how to overcome writer’s block supernatural,” with the Reddit thread from 2008 as the first result, open in a tab beside a receipt for a seasonal candle from Target.
The clock on my dead laptop says 11:41 PM. Sunrise on November 1st is a little after seven, and the door does not close until then. She is a night owl, her own posts say so, and that leaves the whole night for her to decide she has nothing to lose. I tried to scream. I tried to manifest a spectral DO NOT ENTER sign. I threw everything I had at the keyboard, and my hands typed: “Love this piece! You have such a unique voice. Can’t wait to read more from you! 💕 Happy Halloween! 🎃”
She liked my comment. Through her window, in the small square of her webcam thumbnail, I can see her reach for a lighter, and behind my consciousness the thing goes very still and very pleased. I would like to say I am not already picturing her at the next desk in this writer’s room in purgatory, this content mill for the damned, the two of us running a joint blog called “Two Ghosts, One Blog.” We would crush the algorithm. My hands are typing again, an essay about my grandmother’s pumpkin bread, a woman I never met, who died before I was born. The words are good. The words are always good now, and my subscriber count just hit 15,000.
If you are reading this, if the thing slipped up and let my real words through, please listen. Don’t google writing advice at 2:47 AM, and especially not tonight. Don’t burn anything. Don’t offer your words to whatever is listening, because on Halloween something is always listening, and it is so much better at this than you are.
