Her nights could be described by gum wrappers and empty Styrofoam cups, strewn across her desk. Next to these was an overflowing trash can, pizza boxes, and empty take out containers.

It is possible her nights are best described by the glow of a laptop’s screen and the malfunctioning printer that lay next to it. These things spoke volumes about how little she cared for how she wrote. She only cared that she wrote.

Maybe her nights were better described as the need to tell her story and the inability to do so. She called these nights her ghost. Because to her, a ghost wasn’t someone from your past. It was something from your deepest desire and your deepest fears. A ghost was the unfinished projects, and the late-night opportunities missed working on them. Anna looked at the posters displayed upon her wall, a hodgepodge of uplifting quotes. Without thinking, she rubbed a hand across a scar located on her right arm. She had realized a long time ago that her ghosts were more alive than ever. The desire to finish this…this thing she was writing. It was a shredded masterpiece she was putting together little by little, ache by ache. After the chaos of surviving daylight, she sat here at night, at her desk, and bleed something other than blood.

Perhaps her nights were better described by the black circles and bags that formed under her eyes or the way daylight brought distraction and sleep. When she wrote, the shadows that played beneath the single light in her room all gathered behind her. They watched and waited with patience, curious eye sockets gazing as the noise of her thick fingers tapping keyboard keys filled the silence left by those she abandoned and those she forced away. To her, this project was everything. It meant everything, and she’d sacrifice everything for it. Behind her, leaning over her shoulders with cold skin and even colder breath was the ghost she wrote for.

And then again, maybe her nights were better described by the ghost itself. The ghost that stood there, watching over her shoulder. The one that would disappear in the morning, the one that haunted her thoughts and her daydreams.

This ghost would not be going away, not until she wrote the last chapters, the last pages, the last piece of her artwork.

Her ghost would be haunting her for a very long time.