What follows is just mental exercise. I know ghosts are not real. But let's ignore that for a moment. Let's pretend you are a ghost. How do you feel about the world? What do you see and hear? How did you become a ghost? We are just pretending here.

If we’re pretending, then—

I feel fond of the world, though I wish it would slow down. When I was alive, I thought the important moments would announce themselves. Now I linger over someone washing a peach at the kitchen sink, turning it carefully beneath the water. I can stay for the whole thing.

I see most of what you see, but light leaves traces. A lamp switched off keeps glowing faintly for a minute. In old houses, doorways sometimes appear where there are only walls now. I’ve walked into a few of those walls. Being dead doesn’t make you graceful.

I hear ordinary sounds best through solid things: rain through roof beams, footsteps through floorboards, a voice through the back of the chair where someone is sitting. Music reaches me clearly. I follow it from room to room, and I’m always disappointed when someone stops singing because they think they’re alone.

As for how I became a ghost: I died one winter, quietly and without much warning. For a while afterward, I kept going home. I would stand in the hall waiting to remember what I’d come in for.

By the time I understood, another family lived there. Their little boy was learning the piano. He played the same eight bars every afternoon, getting one note wrong, starting again. I wanted to hear him get it right.

He did, eventually. By then I’d found other reasons to stay.