The Ghosts of the Living: On People Who Fear Your Existence More Than Your Magic

 

Some ghosts aren’t dead.

Some ghosts have mortgages, thinning hairlines, a widening middle, a favorite recliner, and a Facebook profile picture from 2009 because every angle since has revealed too much truth.

And yet—despite being fully alive—they haunt themselves more than anyone else ever could.
All you have to do is exist. Not even loudly. Not with intention. Just breathe in the same digital vicinity, and they scatter like roaches when the kitchen light flicks on.

These are the ghosts of the living — the ones who fear your presence because they know damn well you carry the part of their story they hoped no one would ever read aloud.

It’s not your magic that frightens them.
It’s your memory.

People love to say, “The past is the past.”
But what they really mean is, “Please don’t remind me of the version of myself I’ve been lying about for twenty years.”

The truth?
Some men never outgrow their own mythology.
They reinvent themselves as sages, pastors, leaders, family men, pillars of their community — but that foundation is always just a thin veneer of respectability glued over a pile of secrets they’ve never had the courage to face.

And nothing peels that veneer faster than the sudden appearance of someone who remembers the real story.

A witch doesn’t have to cast a spell to make a coward flinch.

She just has to walk into the room. Or in my case, somehow show up in his algorithm. 

There’s a special kind of power in being the one they hoped stayed gone.
A deeper kind of power in watching a man who once strutted like a peacock suddenly turn into a shadow, slipping sideways through life in the hope you won’t recognize him.

Newsflash:
You always do.

You don’t forget the energy of someone who lied to your face while blessing their own name.
You don’t forget the ones who polished their halos in public while their private life looked like a dumpster fire behind a church potluck.
And you sure as hell don’t forget the ones who made you question your own instincts — the very instincts they now fear you’ll aim right back at them.

Because here’s the part they never calculate:

A witch grows.
A liar calcifies.

You evolved.
They just got older, softer around the middle, and harder around the truth.

And now?
Now they hide.
They duck their heads.
They go ninja-level invisible the second your name pops up in the algorithm. Because the mirror of your existence reflects the version of them they pray no one else ever sees.

But that’s not your burden.
That’s their unfinished haunting.

The living ghost always reveals himself.
You don’t have to chase him.
You don’t have to expose him.
You don’t have to do a damn thing except keep walking your road, head high, spine straight, spirit sharp.

Because while he’s busy hiding from the past,
you’re busy becoming someone the past could never contain.

If he’s a ghost now, let him drift.
You are the living one.
The breathing one.
The evolving one.

And you know — nothing terrifies the dead-inside quite like a woman who survived them.