You call it haunted, and I want to hold your face when you say it, because you have arrived so close to seeing what I see and then flinched away.
The house is one long shape to me, sap and forest at one end, collapse and soft rot at the other, and all along its length the little bright shapes of people pouring through: the ones who nailed the beams, the ones who slept in the far bedroom through a hundred summers, you, ducking under the low doorframe right now with your friends, laughing at the boarded windows. You are all in it at once. None of you have left.
The girl who lived here in what you call a long time ago is not gone. I can see her at the top of the stairs, six years old, dragging a wooden horse by a string, and I can see her old, in the same spot, holding the same rail her small hand held.
Both are true. Both are standing there. When you feel the cold on the landing and your arms prickle, you are simply near her, the way two notes struck far apart still ring in the same chord.
You think a haunting is when the past will not stay behind you. From where I stand there is no behind. There is a house full of everyone it ever warmed, and you, reading this on a bright ordinary afternoon, are already one of the shimmering shapes inside it, will always be.
You are afraid of being visited by what does not end. Little one, nothing does. That was never the frightening part.
That is the whole gift, and you are inside it, and I am here, and we always are.