I feel like the people who say “you’re never alone” don’t know what real loneliness feels like. They say it for whatever reason, usually to make things more manageable, or to stop your sobbing long enough to ask for the Wi-Fi password. Whatever their initially noble intentions are, it always leaves you with an even stronger sense of grief, sadness, or whatever other words wrap “losing someone” into a neat little box. Every time I tell myself that “I’m never truly alone” since I can “visit my family whenever I want,” my loneliness only gets worse.
          In some twisted way, it’s funny that I’m the sibling who wound up dying. My sister always made an effort never to drink in front of me, but we both knew it was a facade. There was an unspoken understanding that we had different ways of dealing with our childhoods. Instead of being self-destructive, I resorted to writing ghost stories, which I guess is fairly ironic.
          I’ve recently spent a lot of time in her room, feeling guarded by the ‘80s movie and music posters plastered across every surface. My cat often curls up next to me on the room’s soft pink carpet, and I spend hours burying my tears in the fabric. My mind meanders between sleeping and crying while I listen to the crackling music from my sister’s record player. She comes home and hardly even notices the songs playing on their own.
          I’ve wandered through my school, drifting in and out of different classes. Leaving the house gets increasingly difficult each time, so I've recently been staying in my sister’s room.
          I hadn’t left the house in a while, so I tried to visit the place where my sister and I used to go for pizza once a month. I couldn’t really buy anything, given that nobody can see me, let alone hear me. I didn’t mind much, since I haven’t been all that hungry recently. I actually don’t eat anything anymore. Being a ghost really does wonders for your meal budget.

          Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing for me to do but watch the people I love slowly forget me. They wear black clothes and find the kindness to stand in the rain for a solid ten minutes, and then they leave me. After a couple months, all I’m worth to these people is a simple head-shake and sigh.
          And that’s it.
          They leave me.
          I couldn’t care less about most of them. My parents didn’t really like me anyway. I doubt they even remember my middle name. But I didn’t think my sister would leave me, or at least not forget me. I watched her text with friends during my funeral, and then leave for a party that night. I saw her take the money from my piggy bank and spend all of it on a new electric guitar. I was with her when she graduated high school, promptly packed her belongings, and finally left me for good.
          I tried to follow her, but at this point merely leaving her room made me pass out from the pain. I obviously couldn’t follow her, so I did the next best thing.
          I waited for her. I watched through the window in her room, endlessly listening to the records she left behind. I waited for two more years until my cat died, nestled in my translucent arms. My parents retired and sold the house. A new family moved in, and I waited through nonstop construction sounds, screeching of toddlers, laughing of children, alarm clocks of teenagers. When the family was all grown up and moved out, I went through it all over again with a new family. And another family after that. The more people who cycled through my home, the more it began to die.
          I waited as ivy curled up the walls, climbing toward my roof and blocking any windows in its path. I waited while rats scuttled through my floors, infesting every corner with burrows and tunnels. I waited for mold to bubble across the windowsills and sprout throughout the ceiling.
          I desperately watched through my sister’s window as the only world I had ever known both literally and figuratively decayed around me. It was like I had to die a second time, only now far more slowly and immensely more painfully.

          And one day she finally came back, materializing behind me without making a sound. She was see-through like me, her hunched body shimmering in the moonlight that seeped through the broken roof. By now she’d become an elderly woman, and by her face, I knew I must’ve waited over eighty years. When I glared into my sister’s glossy eyes, my overwhelming anger was returned by her trembling lip and streaming tears.
          My sister drifted over to where I stood, and we both waited silently for the other to start speaking. One a fourteen-year-old, the other at least ninety. When she leaned in to hug me, instead of phasing through, her frail arms wrapped around me. “I’m so sorry,” she managed to get out between uncontrollable sobs.
          And for the first time, I wasn’t alone anymore.