Digital Hauntings

I used to think ghosts haunted old houses. Now I think they haunt our servers. Our cloud drives. Our voice memos. Our TikTok drafts. The unplayed voicemails from people we never imagined losing. The Snapchat streaks that never broke because we just couldn’t bear to. We are surrounded by the digital phantoms of every past version of ourselves, and the people we loved when we were them.

Maybe this is grief 2.0.

Not just missing someone, but being followed by them. Nudged by them. Suggested in your “memories” on a random Thursday. Sometimes I wonder what my own ghost will look like in the machine. A series of cringey tweets? A Google doc full of never-finished poems? A million logins to a site I never figured out how to leave gracefully?

Or maybe I’ll just linger in someone else’s inbox. Unread. Unopened. Untouched, but somehow, still... present.

We think of data as cold and mechanical, but it carries heat. The heat of a moment. The breath between words. The love in a heart that still typed “Let me know you got home safe.” Digital hauntings are not always scary. Sometimes, they’re the only proof we have that love ever lived here at all.

If no one has told you this lately, you don’t have to open that message. You don’t have to delete it either. Just know that ghosts, like grief, are just trying to remind us what mattered.

Stay Weird. Love you. Mean it.
—No Apologies, Just Stories.