The Room of The Mind, The Two Selves and The Ghosts at The Table

 The room of my mind is never empty.

It shifts with the seasons, sometimes warm, washed in gold, with open windows that let laughter wander in from the distant places. Other times, it is winter there. The curtains drawn, the air still, a silence that feels heavy enough to touch.

I know every corner of this room, the desk where I write the thoughts I am too afraid to speak, the worn chair which remembers the weight of my tiredness, the shelves where I place pieces of the past I am not ready to let go.

Somewhere in this room, two selves live together.

One self remembers the years when love travelled across oceans. The way conversations could steady a restless night, the hours of laughter. She is soft-eyed, unguarded, certain that what was built over years could not be undone by a single season apart.

The other stands by the door with her coat on. She remembers the night the truth arrived - uninvited, unyielding, and edged with shapes her mind had never dared to imagine. She knows the sound of a heart sealing itself shut. Her pockets hold a map of every exit.

They do not hate each other. They are sisters bound not by choice but by the moment trust fell through the floor. They share this body, moving around one another as the days pass. The first tends to the garden, she is the reason I can still feel a flicker of warmth when a familiar memory drifts close. The second checks the locks twice before answering.

It is my nervous system and memory system trying to protect me from future harm while still processing the emotional loss, but in human form. Love and caution dressed as two women, neither willing to leave the other entirely alone.

Some mornings I feel the first self more strongly, the one who still believes that love can mend anything if you hold it long enough. Other days it is the second who rules, the one who would rather lose everything than risk that kind of fall again.

And then there are the evenings when they are not alone. 

The table is full.

I sit across from the memory of a version of myself who never learned the truth. She is laughing, pouring tea, talking about the future without knowing which parts will never come. Beside her is the shadow of what was, the way the world felt when I still believed.

The air is thick with the ghosts of conversations unfinished, plans that never made it beyond the doorway, arguments I rehearsed in my mind but never spoke aloud. They clink their glasses in a toast to a time I can’t return to.

I do not chase them away, some ghosts are not meant to be exorcised but understood, studied like old maps whose roads no longer exist, yet still explain how you arrived here.

When the night ends, I clear the table. The first self waters the plants. The second checks the locks. The ghosts slip quietly back into the corners of the room.

And I go on living in the house that is both memory and present tense, where love and loss sit side by side, and where the truce between my two selves is renewed each day, silently, without ceremony.