Little Ghosts (Should’ve Been Us)… (2-11) – Commentary

Commentary (The Receipt)

This isn’t a breakup post.

It’s a nervous-system inventory.

It’s me naming the two different kinds of “ghost” that follow a person who’s wired for depth, structure, and devotion:

  • the big ghosts — the real dynamics, the real exits, the real fires
  • and the little ghosts — the almosts, the near-misses, the people who never even made it to “us,” but still somehow got filed as important

Most people understand the first category. It’s culturally legible.

The second category is the one that makes people feel quietly insane.

Because it doesn’t come with “proof.”

No anniversary. No breakup. No receipts.

Just a system that keeps replaying a life that never actually happened.

That’s what this piece is. Not romance. Not nostalgia.

A little haunting, isn’t it.

The opening sequence: why I start with “I could / I couldn’t”

That opening isn’t poetry for poetry’s sake.

It’s the cleanest way to show the difference between:

  • capacity

and

  • tolerance

A lot of people can survive almost anything if they decide to go numb enough.

They call that “strength.”

I don’t.

I call it endurance without dignity.

So the repetition is me saying: yes, I had the ability to stay. I had the ability to swallow it. I had the ability to suffer longer.

And then the turn:

I didn’t stay. Not because I couldn’t take pain.

Because I refused to make pain my home.
Not perfection.
Standards.

“The only thing that ever held me back… was me.”

That line is there because it’s the most important piece of dominance people miss.

Dominance isn’t what you can do to someone.

It’s what you can do with yourself when you’re activated.

It’s restraint. It’s discernment. It’s choosing structure over impulse when impulse is screaming.

I’m not interested in the fantasy of a savior-partner, or the myth of “the right person” fixing a life.

I’m interested in the harder truth:

If you’re wired like me, you either become the one who holds the line…

or you become someone else’s cautionary story.

Why I separate “ghosts” from “little ghosts”

The “little ghosts” turn is the trapdoor in this piece.

Because the big ghosts have a narrative arc. They have a beginning, middle, end.

Little ghosts don’t.

They’re fragments.

A glance. A short season. A message thread that went deep and then vanished.

And your brain — if it’s wired for attachment and meaning — will try to finish the story anyway.

It will write the missing chapters.

It will assign a destiny to a person who was barely a cameo.

That’s not weakness. That’s not neediness.

That’s imagination plus hunger plus pattern-recognition.

It’s also why little ghosts can last longer than real relationships.

They don’t have an ending strong enough to close the file.

Cold cases.

The first crush: why I tell it the way I tell it

That first story isn’t there to romanticize anything.

It’s there to show the earliest prototype of the little ghost:

  • intense fixation on someone barely known
  • a whole internal movie built from almost no footage
  • the “we’re friends” line that makes zero logical sense — and still lands like a stamp

That “pre-friendzone / quantum friendzone” humor is doing a job: it keeps the reader from drowning in the shame of recognition.

Because the truth is: a lot of people have a ghost like that.

A person from the early years who never even really entered the story… but still lives in the mind like a locked room.

Also, note what I’m actually confessing there:

I wasn’t in love with her.

I was in love with a concept that she activated.

That’s the point.

The bathroom moment: why it’s in here at all

That scene exists for one reason:

It’s the clearest example of what I mean when I talk about power and ethics without turning it into a sermon.

It would’ve been easy to write that as a brag — I guess.

It would’ve been easy to write it as pure regret comedy — I guess.

But I didn’t.

Because the real content is the test:

What do you do when you want something badly, and you know the conditions around it would create collateral damage?

That moment is me showing the early formation of a rule that governs my adult life in this lifestyle:

Your hunger does not outrank other people’s lives.

And I’m not saying that to be virtuous.

I’m saying it because the lifestyle is real.

It touches reputations, relationships, marriages, bodies, trauma histories, self-image.

You can’t play in that world and pretend it’s consequence-free just because your body is loud.

That’s not dominance. That’s chaos with a title.

Modern little ghosts: why I bring the lifestyle in

The adult “graveyard” section is there to connect the concept to the world we actually live in now.

Because if you’re in this lifestyle for any length of time, you start collecting a very specific kind of haunting:

  • a person who calls you “Sir” once and vanishes
  • a negotiation that gets deep enough to imprint, then disappears
  • a near-dynamic that never becomes official, but still gets simulated in your head like it did

That’s a modern phenomenon.

We didn’t used to have infinite access to each other’s nervous systems through a screen.

Now we do.

And it creates a new kind of intimacy that can be real… and still not be durable.

So you end up with these tiny collisions that leave dents.

Little ghosts.

Not because you’re broken.

Because your system took someone seriously for a minute.

Even if they couldn’t stay real long enough to earn it.

Why there are only two “named” little ghosts

I didn’t stack ten examples on purpose.

Part of it is craft: if I keep dragging you past more and more faces, the piece stops being a clean concept and starts reading like a man chained to the past.

And I’m not writing from that posture.

Also—there is a third ghost in here already. The bathroom moment counts. It’s just a different flavor: not a person I carried, but a doorway I didn’t walk through. Same haunting. Different costume.

So I kept it to two in-the-flesh ghosts for a reason.

Those were early, tangible collisions—back when there wasn’t a block button. Back when people didn’t vanish by deleting an account, changing a username, and wiping the thread like it never happened. You either saw them again… or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, your brain had to live with the unanswered question the old-fashioned way.

They’re clean examples because they come from the era where “almost” had weight. Where a near-miss could linger simply because there was no quick, modern way to close the file.

If I added more, the meaning wouldn’t deepen—it would just get louder. And the point of this piece isn’t to prove I’m haunted.

I think you can already feel that, if you’ve made it this far.

It’s to show how little ghosts get made.

The line I didn’t write

There was another option at the end of that bathroom section.

Not a third ghost — but another move.

A closing line I could’ve dropped in that would’ve tied the whole thing together with a neat, brutal little bow. The kind of ending that makes a reader sit back and go, “Jesus. Okay.” The kind of writer-flex that lands like a door slamming.

And yes — it would’ve been great.

Not in the “look at me” way.

In the “the craft just clicked into place” way.

But I didn’t write it.

Because it would’ve been a problem — not for the people in this story, not for anyone in the lifestyle — but for the kind of “authority” that, in that time and place, had a vested interest in keeping certain situations a quiet whisper. The kind of thing everyone knows about, but nobody touches.

For the record: I didn’t know about any of what I’m alluding to until I was long removed from that situation — and it has nothing to do with any partners, dynamics, or anyone in the lifestyle.

But more importantly: it would’ve violated the ethics I’m laying down in the post itself.

You don’t get to talk responsibility and then end on a real punchline that makes you feel clever while it quietly breaks the rules you just set.

So I left it on the cutting-room floor.

And I’m not going to quote it here, either.

Not because I don’t trust you.

Because some things are too sharp to handle casually — and because if I ever do write that paragraph, it probably deserves its own piece someday.

Why the humor is sharp in this one

This piece has teeth in it on purpose.

Not cruelty. Not punching down.

Teeth.

Because without those laughs, a post like this turns into a soft sob story — the kind that begs to be comforted instead of understood.

And I’m not writing from that posture.

The humor is the pressure valve. It lets the reader breathe without letting the meaning slip.

It’s also a boundary.

A way of saying: yes, this is tender, and yes, it still belongs to me. I can look at it straight without turning it into a shrine or a wound I perform for attention.

If I let it get too solemn, it turns into a eulogy for timelines that never existed.

If I let it get too cute, it turns into flirting with my own nostalgia.

So I kept it sharp.

I make the jokes where the shame would normally live.

I turn the camera slightly, just enough to keep the scene from swallowing the whole room.

Because the truth is: I’m not reading these memories like a victim.

I’m reading them like someone who survived his own appetite.

I’m keeping my hand on the wheel while I’m driving through memory.

What I’m actually offering the reader here

I’m not asking the reader to stop being haunted.

I’m not even asking them to “heal.”

I’m doing something simpler and harder:

I’m trying to give them language for a thing they’ve felt privately, and probably judged themselves for.

And I’m framing it in a way that keeps your dignity intact:

Little ghosts don’t mean you’re pathetic.

They mean you’re someone who doesn’t do shallow very well.

They mean your system remembers potential.

They mean you wanted more than “almost” and “maybe” and “one day.”

You’re just going to learn how to want it without letting it derail the things that are real — and much, much more important.

On the Companion Track: “Should’ve Been Us” — Tori Kelly

This track isn’t here because it’s sad.

It’s here because it understands the exact flavor of ache this piece is about:

Not heartbreak from a relationship that ended.

Heartbreak from a timeline that never happened.

It’s the sound of:

  • the mind replaying a version of events that didn’t occur
  • the body responding anyway
  • the quiet humiliation of caring about something that never became “real” enough to justify the feeling

And the reason it pairs so well is because it runs parallel to the central truth of little ghosts:

You don’t miss what happened.

You miss what your nervous system believed could’ve happened.

That’s why the song lands like it does.

It doesn’t just say “I miss you.”

It says: I miss the life my brain built around you.

Cycle II – Coming of Age · 11 · Commentary (v1.00)

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