“Don’t take it so literally,” my husband said as he paced the pressed cedar of our living room floor.

“I’m not,” I retorted, pulling on my fingers like overcooked spaghetti. “You always assume I don’t get it.”

“So, you know that there’s not actually a ghost in the attic?” he frowned, which could mean a hundred things.

“Of course,” I said, because I’d seen the ghost in other places, too. The attic was not where it lived.

You know that feeling when you say something and you can tell that no one understands? That’s a ghost like mine. One that steals words, robbing them from my sentences and stowing them under its white as sugar sheet like candy. I’d been accompanied by one since I started talking, but that’s not all it did.

My ghost also liked to give hugs. Hugs that were so frigid they made my tongue stumble on icicled ideas. Then, my words would stop mid-sentence, frozen in the ghost’s embrace. It was why so many people cut me off before I was done speaking from childhood to present day. They thought I was done whenever I paused.

And then, one day, Lars, told me that there was a ghost in the attic. Not the literal kind, he accentuated, more like a draft that knocked over boxes and creaked floorboards. But I knew it was my ghost that he was mistaking for sneaky wind. He had finally realized something followed me. It made sense, since lately my ghost had been fussy.

Take the other day when I was at school, showing a student how to structure a sentence, subject before verb. My principal walked in, my ghost latched on her back like a flea on a basset hound, and it screamed at me, while I was teaching.

I tapped my fingers, trying to cover the noise, but the ghost shrieked louder, bucket-mouthed, and not stopping. My principal had no idea there was a screaming ghost attached to her making me misunderstand every word that she spoke. She didn’t notice anything odd about my behavior either besides asking why I was always so quiet.

The following week, my ghost followed me to the grocery store. It stood with me in the soup aisle, wondering where the chicken noodle was. After fifteen minutes of tapping like an unhinged shutter, my ghost started weeping, and I cried to. I always have soup for lunch. It’s one of the only things I like. What was I going to eat the next day?

So, when I came home this afternoon and Lars complained more about the noises in the attic, it made sense to think of my ghost. Don’t misunderstand; I wasn’t angry. I was worried about the spirit that haunted me. It was sensitive, and it often ran to dark places to hide. I knew, because it was exactly what I did when I felt the same.

“I’m calling someone,” my husband said, still frowning, yet this time at me, not the ceiling. I sat on the floor of our laundry room, compact and rumbling so I could pretend that I was soaring away on a spaceship, instead of trapped on the ground.

“Don’t,” I pulled my knees to my chest. “It’s okay. I’m just overwhelmed.”

“I don’t know what to do when you get this way,” my husband hung his head.

And my ghost wanted to yell at him. To explode. I heard it moaning above.

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “I’ll feel better if you give me a moment.”

“Okay,” my husband sighed, looking back at the ceiling. “It’s just hard when there’s a ghost in the attic.”

There was a thump overhead.

I considered chastising my ghost then. Telling it to be quiet; that it was rude to interrupt two people in a conversation. That was until its hazy face materialized before me, smiling like a pale clown. It chuckled at me, just a face without a body.

“No more!” I shouted at the face, prompting Lars to gaze at me with downturned eyes. He couldn’t see my ghost, so now there were two beings glaring at me like I was the most perplexing person in the universe.

“I’ll leave you be,” Lars said, standing to leave the room. There was more of my ghost between us now, a full body over seven feet tall. I had to look through its foggy form to see Lars on the other side of it, dreary as if he stood in a thunderstorm.

“No,” I called to Lars, reaching forward and feeling my ghost’s cool mist on my forearms. My arm was inside of it up to my elbows, and it was so cold that I couldn’t move, a prisoner of my spirit.

That’s when I noticed that my ghost was trembling.

I examined its black, pearly eyes searching for the root of its quivers and gasped as I saw it was crying. Clear teardrops like tiny crystal worlds fell from each eye silently. I wondered why it had been hiding in the attic and what might have caused it to be so overwhelmed.

“I’m sorry,” my ghost whispered. “I’m doing the best I can.”

I thought of the stolen words, the choppy sentences, and the intense emotions-everything that my ghost had taken over the years. To me it had never been the enemy, but it clearly considered itself as one. So, as it stood before me, sobbing like it did in that grocery aisle with no favorite soup, I cried, too. Just like him, I was doing my best and sometimes, it didn’t feel good enough.

Lars watched us for several minutes from the doorway, haunted by his lack of understanding before he peered at the ceiling. I knew what he was thinking, the tension fading from his mouth.

For the first time in weeks, it was quiet in the attic.