I feel like I'm doing nothing but chasing ghosts as I end up tortured by them.

Her smiles never touched the corners of her eyes, not even close. Like a pale imitation of a fake smile or an attempt by someone who has never seen one in person, only heard about them from books or television. Somewhere between a smirk and a sneer that didn't match everything else on her face. An attempt at trying to look happy and pleasant gone completely awry as she tried to keep her mask up with no light behind the eyes, just a sense of dread and unease.

I feel like I am in a (losing) fight with ghosts at this point.
Ghosts of Past, Present and Possibly Future.
Maybe I am not cut out for this kind of thing anymore. A nuisance. A redundancy.
She is haunting from beyond the grave now and trying hard to get me to unravel.
Misreading and misinterpreting because we're always on the lookout for those "tell-tale behaviors".
There is no existential pain or agony involved it's just existential emptiness.
I am here but not.
An outline consisting of dotted lines and curves but with no inner structure; a chalk outline found at a crime scene given life and sentience.
It's never safe to let the words out so like animals they are buried deep within the ground, away from any predators so they can't sniff us out.
Make sure you bury deep enough else the words will surface again the next time it rains and soil turns to mud that leaves tracks like mascara stains on cheeks from tears that shed no matter how hard you try to stem the flow.
No one says anything at the hint of saline leaving paths on skin and sometimes dark lines are invisible too.
all of our lines are invisble. even the ones that give birth to a taste of what lies beneath our skin if only we'll let it surface.