The Ghost

    The ghost I carry with me is a little seven year old girl. She haunts me sometimes, even as I sleep. This girl follows me everywhere and sometimes I pretend I am her and she is me. We swap places. I let her carry the burden of adulthood as I wear the dress of her carefree naiveté. Oh, how Iong to be her. To not know. To love purely. To hurt deeply. To forgive so readily, so freely.
   Yet, I seem to be the only one to remember her as I do. There are pictures of her. References to her. Documentations of her. Yet only I, it seems, carry her with me. I take her with me everywhere and try to disguise myself as her. A young, naive, seven year old who knows nothing of danger. I pretend to ignore the growing knowledge of the hostility in the world I inhabit. I pretend to not understand the pain that impregnates me as the years go by. With every encounter of a young woman who carries a similar ghost with her, there is a sense of sisterhood, a belonging. With every news of another young child whose innocence is lost, the womb bearing grief grows. Yet, there is some twisted assurance that a new one has joined the fold. The sisterhood grows.
    I can no longer bear to keep the silence of a reality so profound and widespread. I know that my ghost symbolizes all that I wish to ignore. The stigmatization of sexuality. The evasion of the devastating results of imperialism. The reluctance to address the issues of classism. The sense of religious righteousness and ignorance of destructive dogmatism. All for the sake of the human egoic tendency to adopt a form of identification. Sometimes, at the expense of one's own self.
    I find it hard to admit, to openly confess and reconcile with the disastrous effects of the loss of my own innocence. I find it easier to cower and hide behind laughter. It is far more comfortable to create and rediscover indecipherable vocabulary terms that will conceal my true thoughts, my honest emotions.
     Many times, I dream of the ability to speak in front of large crowds to atone for my perceived sins without them being aware that the audience that I am really addressing is myself. I wish to be such a great orator who is exalted for her lofty words, so that in my self-imposed glory I could feign liberation from my past. But alas, I have become a slave to my ghost. She will not release me until I find the courage to speak freely and openly so that I not only liberate myself, but others like me.