Ghosts Are Quieter Than People

Somewhere in my house right now, my husband is putting something together. I know this the way you know weather is coming. And I know that within about four minutes, I will be needed to locate a screwdriver, or to hold one end of a thing steady while he does something to the other end of it. I have never applied for this job. I have held it for years.

I am an introvert. Let me tell you what that does and does not mean, because most people get it wrong.

It does not mean shy. I write about demons. I host a podcast about hauntings. I have gone live on Facebook and talked to a camera for two hours. I will tell you exactly what I think, and I will not soften it much. Shy is not my problem.

What it means is that people cost me something. Not because I dislike them. Because being with them draws from a well, and the only thing that fills the well back up is being alone. That is the whole definition. An extrovert walks out of a crowded room lit up. I walk out of one needing a closed door and about forty-five minutes of nobody needing anything.

I am not shy. I am solar powered by silence, and I have been living in a very sunny house.

Here is my life. By most people’s math, I should be retired. Instead there is a household to run and family under my roof and family beside it, and all of them are loved, and all of them need something. There are meals that appear three times a day because I make them appear. There is grief in my family that needs a person to sit with it, and I am a person. There is a husband, who needs a husband’s worth of things, which is more things than you would think. There are my animals, who need me and who also happen to be some of the best emotional support I have ever had, so that one is a fair trade. I get up around six. I rest when everyone else has stopped needing.

I would not hand a single one of them back. That is the part I want to be clear about. My house is loud because it is full of people I love, and a full house is not a problem to be solved. It is an enormous mercy that happens to be exhausting. On the hard days, I do not white-knuckle it. I ask God for strength, and He has never once failed to hand it over.

But I will tell you where I go to be alone, and here is the joke of my whole life: I go to Alaska. I go to a bayou in East Texas at dusk. I go to a police station in a small town where a woman named Kat is about to have a very bad week. The page is the only room in my house with a door on it.

That is why I write. Not the only reason, but a truer one than I usually admit. Everybody thinks the woman who writes about the dark must be running toward something frightening. Mostly I am just going somewhere quiet.

If you are the kind of person who loves everybody in your house and still hides in the bathroom for ten minutes just to hear nothing, I see you. You are not cold and you are not broken. You are just built to be filled back up a certain way. Go find your quiet room. Then come back out. They will need a screwdriver.