Ghost stories

This shrub is right next to my bedroom window, I think it has snakes and rats or whatever. It’s not surprising then that sometimes at night I will be awakened by a loud thud or a scratchy sound on my ceiling as if something was sharing my bedroom with me. It used to bother me quite a lot, I would wake up in the middle of night and suffer terrible insomnia! It wasn’t until one day I remembered a story my step mother once told me.

There used to be these loud thuds on our ceiling back home, I must have been 8 at the time. The loudest ones would wake me up and I will run to my dad’s room. My dad would tell me it’s the birds and let me sleep in their room only to wake up in my bed🙄. Then one day we were all gone except my stepmom, she was left alone in the house.

When we came back I wanted to find out how she slept alone, wasn’t she scared of the ghosts on the roof? “There were noises as usual and it freaked me out a bit, but I decided I am going to work tomorrow and I need my sleep”, she answered. “I spoke to the ghosts and told them, we are both here! We both want to sleep so we might as well let each other sleep because nobody is leaving this house tonight, and I went to bed”

That story was never profound or that meaningful at the time. I just thought she is lying, she probably didn’t sleep all night, waiting for sunrise. Thinking about it and the shrub next to my room, I know now she wasn’t lying! Like all the discomforts we go through, we can choose to let them discomfort and frustrate us or we can just learn to live with them. Living with them means setting boundaries and defining quiet and noise times. It means acknowledging that they are there, but you have more important things to do than to tend to them!

rachel