Title: Haunt You Every Day
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Rating: Gen
Length: 350 words
Content notes: Minor character POV, 1st person POV,
Author notes: Counting towards the following badges: governor of gen, beta boss (betaed by the every lovely firstlightofeos.)
Summary: There's different MO for every ghosts. She knows all too well.

I’m supposed to write a poem about a ghost for school. Not in the Casper sort of way, mind you, but in a way that conveys exactly what ghosts do and how they go about it.

Problem is, I know too well how ghosts operate. I think I live near three of them.

haunted
he looked haunted

trapped in an infinite loop

in me
he saw someone

his sister
my namesake

drawn in eyes
paled expressions

lost
always lost

never found

poem written for English class, October 2021

Dad never looks at my homework. He likes to be exactly the opposite of his parents, which is fine with me. He is relaxed when I come home complaining about essays, but also knows how to say the right thing to push me to finish.

Only, when he does push, I can see that he thinks of the past--those friends and his sister--that he has given up for me.

It feels like three ghosts live with us. There’s Auntie Lilly, my namesake, who floats in and out laughing at Dad every time. It sounds like she says Donut each time and Dad laughs slightly before going into the fridge for something to drink.

The other two have no names. Well, I know they do, but Dad never tells me more than that they were his best friend and the love of his life. They arrive as a pair, always bickering with each other. It sometimes sounds like a car is being smashed into pieces. Sometimes like the waves of the ocean as they crash against the sand.

No matter what, they are ghosts. Figments of a place so far away from here. Some place I will never see. Dad’s stories of his life before he left always sound like fairy tales. They sound like everything I miss being with him here, away from everyone he knows. Away from all of my classmates.

These ghosts do more than haunt. They confine us.

We are never going to escape the past, even if there is a giant ocean between us and where Dad came from.