One winter morning, smitten in our afterglow and possessed by overwhelming warmth and affection for my partner, Wayne, I do the modern thing of speaking a song into existence.

“Alexa, play ‘The Book of Love’ by The Magnetic Fields.”

A moment of silence, so common and comfortable between us, inhabits our bed. Then, Wayne dreamily tells me something I didn’t know: Melissa and I adored Peter Gabriel’s cover of this song.

I hear that phrase, Melissa and I, frequently, in stories about the life that the two of them shared from the time Melissa was 18 until she died from breast cancer at age 52. Wayne and I met when she had been gone for six months. Melissa and I never knew one another, but I’m not humoring him by listening to his stories; I find joy in them, in learning about these parts of him that someone else helped shape. Often, I’m overcome with gratitude for having a partner who loved and was loved so wholly that he could find me while still honoring his own grief. He speaks my name to me with the same loving reverence. Dusti, Melissa, Dusti, Melissa…

Melissa speaks my name through the translucent white chiffon covering our dressing room windows. Her voice rises above those of the mockingbirds and cardinals that crowd the back garden at Clovernolia, our home. She often finds me while I’m winding down for the night, undressed and in various states of processing my emotions in the framework of an average weekday.

Melissa wants me to check behind the cats’ ears for little bites. She’d like to know the general state of things with them, as Flower especially hasn’t been well (we just lost her last week, the poor dear). She asks me to check some spots on her husband’s back.

She asks me if I’ve cut the sheers around the front door down yet, as she claims she politely requested I do last winter when I first visited the house. But I didn’t recognize her voice then. Being a Depressed Person, I sometimes confuse the real and the imaginary. What do I know of the veil between worlds except what the living have taught me? Believing in ghosts and living with them are separate occupations.

Melissa transcends stories and photos now. She’s our ghost, our invisible audience.

I didn’t know I’d ever live here. While accepting Wayne’s invitation felt natural to me, the invitation itself was a surprise. The first few nights I slept alone, acting as a cat-sitter in the absence of my new partner, who’d accompanied his sister on a trip. The cats I’d met before, in the aforesaid winter, when I’d needed internet access and Wayne offered his. So I knew the cats’ voices – they spoke to me in loud, rowdy, babyish mews that betrayed how much they missed their human mother.

But not her voice. Sometimes I’d think it was just the sound of the wallpaper losing its grip on the 110-year-old walls. Or maybe it was my ancestors’ loud grumbling about me living in sin. Could it be not a ghost, but instead the electronic hum of the modern appliances feeling ill at ease in such an old place? Each night since that October ended, I fall asleep in the bed where she died.

“Why can you see some things and not others?”

She disappears for a few days after I ask her this. Once her husband returns from his trip, she’s back to whispering to me in the dressing-room.

Two weeks later, I’m alone in my old room in Capitol Heights, where I’d briefly shared a house with someone on Winona Avenue. It’s time to clean it out for the next guy. Wayne and I have rented a van for the actual move (think big furniture) that will be happening the next day. On this day, I survey my tiny kingdom: a broken cabinet brimming with carelessly arranged pinecones, no fewer than seven pillows on a queen-sized bed, a green velour chair with hot-pink piping, framed postcards of UFOS on the wall above my chest of drawers.

The decision to leave Winona Avenue for Clovernolia feels both natural and heavy. My partner and I had been friends for nearly a year before making this move; his face is the only face I’d ever seen and thought, “Yes, I would like to see this face every day.” Both our conversation and silence were effortless. Yet I worried for my future self. Would I ever have a room of my own again? (I’m currently turning the second bedroom into my study.) Where will my plushie collection go if there’s another person in the bed? (They live on my nightstand and chest of drawers now.) What if I need to sleep alone some nights? (Turns out that in healthy and loving relationships, people can ask for what they need and sometimes even get it.) My three children, all grown, are cheering for me while at the same time reminding me that I once said I’d never live with a partner again. “And for God’s sake, Mama, please never get remarried.” (Those are the words of my youngest, likely echoing her older siblings’ sentiments.)

I’m giving this solitude up on purpose. (My own words to myself.)

First, I pack my ghost figurine collection: ceramic, stone, plastic, cotton. A couple of them light up. One stays in my pocket most days now.

I’m giving this up on purpose. I remove my Plague Doctor plushie and his little friends (a crow, a ghost, a bat, the green bunny talisman my daughter gifted me) from their burrows among the pillows. Gently, I box them up.

I’m giving this up. On purpose.

Early afternoon sun flashes off the white stone house across Winona Avenue, overwhelming the room with silver light. I disassemble a small table and pack it in with the plushies to give them some stability in the move. I dig all my sunflower pushpins out with a kitchen knife and carefully place them in a small container that I still can’t find five months later.

I give a lot away, a reminder that my idea of forever is different from that of others’. A few people worry (the way you do when a friend is suddenly giving things away), though most are not surprised when I make a public announcement on Instagram, a couple weeks later, in the form of a photo my partner has taken of me at Strand Bookstore in New York City.

I think through a poem I wrote back in my old life:

I hang bells on the gate –

not to ward off the spirits,

but to celebrate their arrival

…

In the distance is

the warm amber music

of all the ghosts

who’ve missed my company.

This poem, like most of my poems – like this story – is a true story. I’ve believed in ghosts since I was three and will continue attributing the unknown that hasn't been scientifically proven to their existence. The truth is that ghosts don’t care if we think they’re real; even I don’t care if they’re real. The idea of ghosts? That’s what resonates with me. The idea that even after death, there’s enough that’s so beautiful here, we're not quite ready to leave. It’s the concepts of Heaven on Earth, or The World to Come, or As Above So Below, in practice. Being a ghost is checking in on your daughter during her first year of living independently and your husband’s prostate MRI and the birds of your neighborhood. Hearing your husband tell beautiful stories about you, watching his broken heart reassemble itself as he falls in love.

Yes, please. More of this, please.

Ghosts witness what the living cannot see through the burdens of our bodies.

Now, when Melissa talks to me, I don’t always know what she’s saying. Sometimes I hear her through the clear voice of my intuition (though she’s reportedly more sensible than I am by nature): unplug that charger, toss the empty box from the pantry into the garbage. But other times—knocking loose books off shelves, shattering glass in the sidelights— she gestures wildly at the world, searching for answers, like the rest of us. And the way the early morning light hits the courtyard flowers outside my study, sending their fragrance out into the world like jasmine and honeysuckle confetti, shows me she’s found a way to celebrate her family’s happiness, too.

Now, it’s morning in mid-January. The dressing-room’s buttery glow tries its best to lull me back to sleep as I move through its beams to my study. Melissa’s husband peacefully snores; he and the bed are still warm from my own body, resting in the radical acceptance of middle-aged love.

I pull out my journal and pen. I cue up our song and crack the screenless windows to eavesdrop on the birds’ conversations. I didn’t know this was their song–Melissa's and Wayne’s–when I had decided in my heart that it was our song. Now, it’s our collective song. We all hum along: Melissa, the birds of our neighborhood, and me.