The Weight of the Unlived Life

There is a ghost that haunts the living. Not the ghost of someone who has died, not the spirit of a person who was here and is no longer here, but the ghost of a life that was possible and was not lived, the faint but persistent presence of the road not taken, the version of the story that could have existed and does not, the self that was latent in you and that did not get to come forward into the full expression that it was reaching toward. This ghost does not announce itself dramatically. It does not rattle chains or appear at the foot of the bed with any of the theatrical equipment of the classical haunting. It appears in subtler forms, in the specific quality of wistfulness that descends without warning in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, in the disproportionate response to someone else's life that seems to be living something you recognize without being able to explain the recognition, in the dream that is not exactly a dream because you are not quite asleep when it visits, the brief and vivid imagining of a different version of things that arrives and passes with the particular quality of something that was almost true.