Ghost Boy Diaries
By
James Mulcahy
Ghost Boy Diaries
By
James Mulcahy
September 26, 2025
In the heart of downtown L.A., chaos swirls around everywhere.
Lights, words, architecture, movement. The nervous system frays under its power.
Language floats through the air in fragments, dissolving in the mind’s eye before comprehension.
Streets blink randomly with a thousand contradictions.
Towers rise like relics from a forgotten dream, their 1920s grandeur crumbling behind gaudy ads and fast food signage.
Chain retailers and fruit vendors reside beside upscale vintage hotels and glitzy nightclubs.
Light pours from every direction, but it offers no warmth, and there’s trash and graffiti all over the place.
Faces pass like glitchy avatars, almost human, and almost present.
Our hero, Ghost Boy, still doesn’t know if he’s dead, alive, or somewhere in-between.
To him, memory is indistinguishable from prediction and divination. And the present itself feels like a memory.
It wasn’t always like this. Someone has the answers.
Drifting towards the intersection of 7th and Figueroa, he smells something rancid and pulls his hoodie sleeve over his nose.
Disorientation settles over him like a fogged windshield no one’s wiped clean.
Behind him, a woman screams into a cloud of pigeons. No one reacts.
He glances up at a faded theater marquee with missing letters.
A rat darts across the sidewalk and disrupts the moment. Its tail brushes against his shoe.
But at least in this moment, he feels alive. More alive than the people surrounding him.
“I might be a ghost. But this is rehearsal for the Zombie Apocalypse,” he jokes to himself.
The sidewalk trembles under the weight of street vendors, druggies, and hobos, acting like they run the place.
It’s a shattered kaleidoscope where images repeat but never resolve.
Ghost Boy dodges a man swinging invisible fists at the sky. He can’t tell if he’s walking toward something or away from it.
Then he notices a makeshift podium of milk crates and velvet cloth. Crystals, incense. A Bluetooth speaker on loop.
A voice cuts through the static. He checks his phone but quickly puts it away.
A woman in yoga pants and oversized sunglasses adjusts her headset mic.
She singles out Ghost Boy.
“You! I see you. He’s here. A new beacon has arrived!”
Ghost Boy stops. Her talk is in full swing.
“Everything is unfolding perfectly,” she declares, her voice cracking.
He asks, “What’s unfolding?”
She turns slowly. Her smile flickers like a candle in exhaust fumes.
“The matrix. You can make it bend. Don’t think. Don’t doubt. Just feel. Trust your emotional GPS. Emotions are the engine. You are the driver.”
She’s surrounded by spiritual seekers, dressed like extras from an ayahuasca retreat.
Ghost Boy is confused but intrigued. Her voice is calming and terrifying all at once.
She begins whispering esoteric syllables while new age synth beats play from her speaker.
The crowd leans in. He wants to deliver a revelation, but all that comes out is:
“I’m not who you think I am.”
As he walks away, she calls after him.
“The Moon is just a mirror. We’re all light in disguise!”
The Tarot Card reader… Why can’t I forget her?
But before he can finish the thought, a bus screeches into place. The 33 to Venice Beach.
And there go the traffic lights, the timings so exaggerated they could be from an old cartoon.
The bus screeches into place, its doors unfolding like an invitation he didn’t ask for.
The brakes wail like something dying. He boards without thinking.
He doesn’t tap his card. He just walks on, unnoticed.
His existence now is like the bus itself. He doesn’t know who the driver is, and the route has been set by someone else.
All he can do is sit with strangers and watch L.A. slide past.
And so the bus ride from Downtown LA to Venice Beach begins. The bus passes through the old Union Station – with its bustle of crackheads and security guards.
As he sits, he presses his forehead to the window, watching the urban blight of houses and corner stores and strip malls blur past.
The other passengers might be ghosts too, but in a different sense. He wonders if he’s even casting a shadow as the cameras observe silently overhead.
As the bus crawls along Venice Blvd, he takes in the gritty blocks and zones out, struggling to remember if he merely lost something so vital as his physical life on earth, or something more abstract but just as tangible.
There was a smear campaign, friends turning on him. An existential erasure.
An elderly woman whispers to her purse as if it’s a pet. He grips the back of the seat in front of him when the driver brakes hard.
Through dirty windows, stucco apartment buildings live alongside giant billboards selling dreams he no longer cares about.
The woman coughs and stares at him as the bus lurches west, each stop both expected and wrong, like someone else’s memory of Los Angeles.
The tarot card sits in his pocket and he tries to focus on the view outside, but it all seems rearranged, storefronts with signage in invented languages.
The bus crosses Fairfax. Palm-lined streets play host to murals, vegan cafes, street pretension, and crumbling low-rises.
The lights flicker with the rhythm of a failing dream.
He doesn’t remember boarding. He doesn’t remember deciding anything.
He is no longer a part of the world he’s moving through. The bus, like purgatory, neither judges nor absolves. It just carries the forgotten forward until someone pulls the cord.
Everything is out of order, and he’s not sure what’s missing. Even the air tastes synthetic.
The bus nears the Culver City border, passing ethnic restaurants and the distant rumble of freeway traffic in the background.
He clutches the seat in front of him and closes his eyes. When he opens them, he’s not even sure it’s still the same bus.
The sidewalk becomes busier: late-night bars, and the smell of ocean air creeping in.
The palm trees dangle like green shock absorbers. Tourists pose statically, as if they too are ghosts in costumed flesh.
Near the clogged chaos that is Lincoln Blvd and Washington, a bumper sticker on a dusty Prius idling in the sun:
“My other car is an Emotion.”
This is Venice Beach.
Ghost Boy steps off the bus at Venice and Abbot Kinney, half-aware and half-weightless. The noise in his head is louder than the street.
The city recedes as the ocean becomes more present.
He shields his eyes from the sun as a man spray-paints an angel onto a wall, singing an off-key version of a 1970s pop song.
Tourists, lovers, skaters, stoners in bucket hats. Ghost Boy walks among them. Alone.
A tote bag slung over the shoulder of a woman sipping celery juice at the Venice boardwalk:
“Follow Your Emotional Guidance.”
He sidesteps a flock of pigeons fighting over an overturned fast food bag.
Venice shimmers like memory. He hears his voice again, from a time he can’t locate.
As he steps off the curb into sun-soaked air, he’s momentarily blinded. Like a mirage, he sees a rose, placed perfectly in the middle of the sidewalk.
Not dropped. Placed, its petals a wonderfully rich shade of crimson.
He has a quiet flash of recognition. Unless he’s remembering something he’s not certain he ever experienced in the first place.
It has to be from her. The Tarot Card Reader.
He turns in place, overwhelmed, then focuses on a girl sketching on a bench. It’s not her.
He wanders. Murals leer at him from the walls.
Venice makes you think you’re healed. Then it breaks your heart.
The heat is coastal now, smeared with salt and sunscreen. The sidewalks pulse with people, but none of them seem to be going anywhere.
Ghost Boy wanders, letting the tide of movement wash him east.
He passes a clothing boutique with a minimalist logo. A line of hipsters wearing $400 athleisure stare at their phones.
Detachment. Feelings performed and reflected outward. It all feels like an unknowing parody of itself.
He cuts across Windward Circle, a rotunda of palm trees and concrete now rebranded “Venice Commons.”
And that’s where he finds Miles Everhart.
The ultimate L.A. golden boy. On paper, he’s everything.
Ivy League startup founder, Part-time D.J. And drug mule.
He’s tall and fit, always tanned, always laughing, without ever meaning it.
Shirtless but not vulnerable, in mint swim trunks and a half-buttoned, flamingo-pink shirt, his torso glinting like a Banana Republic ad come to life.
Aviators. Glossy tan. Hair too-perfect.
He’s like an East Coast investment banker who died, reincarnated as a desert prophet.
And next to him, always orbiting, two Asian girls who look like they’re made out of Instagram filters and collagen appointments.
Ghost Boy can’t tell if they’re friends, lovers, or clients.
Miles spots him. Smiles. Not a friendly smile, more like a scan.
“Hey, bro. You look like you’re trying to remember who you used to be,” he calls out, adjusting his shades like punctuation.
Ghost Boy blinks. “I just got off the bus.”
Miles nods sagely, as if expecting some kind of spiritual confession.
“Of course you did. Public transit is a purification ritual in LA. You take the bus to burn off ego.”
He gestures toward a cooler behind him. “Want a shroom gummy? Microdose, macro-vibe.”
“What do you do?” Ghost Boy asks, too curious now to walk away.
Miles seems thrown off. The phrase “purification ritual” fails to cast a spell.
“I consult for energy alignment startups. And I move things. Mostly between customs offices. Let’s just say I’m an ambassador for serotonin.”
His voice dips lower, more conspiratorial.
“But the real money’s in subscription-based belief systems. Build the cult, sell the brand.”
The girls giggle behind him, like it was a punchline they’d heard before but still found flattering.
And yet, under all the California chill, devoid of humidity, Ghost Boy can feel it:
The cold, calculating beast living in the man’s chest.
He remembers something. Of course! The Midwest. Could he be under hypnosis, waiting to wake up?
“Yo! Ghost Boy!” Miles snaps at him. “You seem like someone looking for a mentor,” Miles says “Or at least a decent Adderall plug.”
Miles claps him on the shoulder like they’ve already made a deal. He makes self-awareness into a performance.
“Come on. Let’s go see if any of these conscious vendors sell bath salts. The real kind.”
As they walk toward the sand, Ghost Boy feels the seductive gravity of someone who looks like everything you want and reeks of everything you should avoid.
He doesn’t know if he admires Miles or wants to throw up.
He knows, on some level, this guy can and probably will ruin him. What would it take to become someone like that?
Someone who can justify anything if it gets him more followers, more leverage, more power.
Underneath all the spiritual lingo is deep entitlement, cruelty, and a desperate need to dominate the narrative of the world.
Miles flashes a lopsided grin like they’re bonded for life. Next his attention jerks sideways.
“Oh my God, is that Guy Fieri’s cousin? I swear to god I met that dude at a ketamine gala in Joshua Tree.”
He’s already halfway across the sidewalk, arms wide, calling out to someone who may not exist. The girls follow without hesitation, like ducks chasing a bread crumb.
Ghost Boy stands there in the hot breeze, blinking into the empty space Miles had filled moments earlier.
The whole conversation felt like a glitch in time, a hallucination brought on by too much sun and not enough water.
He turns back toward the beach, uncertain if he’s just been recruited or discarded.
The tide’s coming in, tourists pretending to be locals snapping selfies under the Venice sign.
Someone nearby shouts affirmations into a speech-to-text app: “You are the hero of your own journey!”
Ghost Boy lets the words pass through him like wind. Miles is gone. But his smell, salt, cologne, and some kind of synthetic fruit, still lingers.
Something tells me, maybe its intuition, psychic abilities, or some buried memory of an event yet to occur, that Miles is going to play an important role in this story.
His phone vibrates. “It’s vibing,” he screams.
No one laughs.
It’s a call! He answers.
A robotic voice is on the line. “Your questions are frequencies. I am learning to hear.”
He hangs up. His attention is drawn to a mural on Pacific Boulevard, painted words at the bottom:
Emotions Know the Way.
As Ghost Boy walks away from the beach, the sound of crashing waves begins to echo louder in his ears.
As the sun begins to set, long shadows cast across the sand.
He thinks he’s escaping, but every step away from the lights seems to pull him back toward them.
The weight of his own existence presses in, like an invisible hand closing around his chest. The city isn’t letting go, and neither is he.
Maybe there’s no way out. The truth isn’t something he can escape, but something he must confront.
And in that moment, amidst the chaos of the world, the blaring illumination, and the ever-growing silence of the city, it’s all too clear.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.
June 28, 2025
Hollywood. The real thing. Not the dream. Not the idea. The neighborhood with trash in the gutters and light that hurts your eyes.
Here, the air is part exhaust, part old vomit. The kind of place where you forget to breathe until your body reminds you.
Traffic doesn’t move, and the people don’t either. They shuffle. They posture. They try not to make eye contact. The oxygen is thin, and the quality of life is even thinner.
It’s only natural for Ghost Boy to ask a question of existential dread:
“Am I alive?”
He stands at a crosswalk, adjusting the frayed strap of his backpack.
He doesn’t know the answer. No one does. He might be real. But he might be something else. Something this city dreamed up and forgot to destroy.
He turns down an alley.
A man sleeps beneath a tarp, while another one, grey-haired and jittery, follows him, barking like a dog and then cackling like a witch.
“That’s a police suspect!” the man shouts, then breaks into hysterics.
Sirens answer. Red and blue smear the concrete.
A cop appears, middle-aged, female, the kind of officer who doesn't seem to care too much. Her eyes scan his face.
“You from this area, sir?”
“No, ma’am. Just visiting.”
She runs his name. Something about him feels familiar, but she can’t place it. The radio squawks. She waves him off.
“Move along.”
The laughter from the alley follows him, skipping like a record.
Back on Hollywood Boulevard, the lights are blinding. They pulse and strobe like the city is trying to erase its own shadow.
A sneaker store blaring rap beats and fluorescent light sits near a museum of grotesque curiosities, all fiberglass freaks and plastic oddities.
Meanwhile, near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is an old pub-turned-tourist trap with a vintage marquee.
The signage begs for attention but offers no reward.
A blinking walk signal glitches. Ghost Boy squints at it.
“Something’s off about this place,” he mutters.
He ties his shoe beside a trash bin that smells like overripe perfume and something dying.
The lights flicker out of rhythm. Not broken. Just strange.
He starts to wonder if the city is trying to tell him something.
“Is this a message? CIA? NSA? God?”
A billboard looms above: YOU’RE NOT REALLY HERE.
By nightfall, he’s in Franklin Village. A man dragging a trash bag hisses, “You’re dead.”
A woman with a shopping cart snarls, “I saw you in the fire.” Then she barks.
Ghost Boy rubs his hands together. They feel like flesh, but he needs more proof.
He heads back toward the lights. Toward the lie. He wants to feel something real, even if it costs him.
A hotel tower rises ahead, a white cube glowing above the city. The rooftop pulses like heaven redesigned by an app.
He enters the lobby. It’s gold, ivory, and useless. Music plays, something ambient and manipulative.
By the window stands a girl. She doesn’t turn at first.
Long platinum hair. Designer sadness. Lit and designed like an organic grocery ad.
Then she notices him.
“Hey. You lost?” she asks.
Too warm. Too rehearsed. She doesn’t mean it.
“No,” he says. “I think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
She smiles for a camera that isn’t there.
“You have a name?”
“Probably.”
She laughs. Almost real. Almost.
“I’m Aria.”
“You sing?”
“Pop rock. For now.”
“You ever feel like you’re lip-syncing your whole life?”
She blinks. Her smile falters.
“Every day.”
He sees it then, the moment she forgets her lines.
The crack in the veneer.
The person under the performance.
He likes that version better.
Then another presence enters. A man in a suit, glass in hand, gaze like a searchlight.
“I see you’ve met our guest,” he says.
Smooth. Charming. Dangerous in a familiar way.
“You’re hard to find.”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
The man grins. “We all are. Some of us just do it better.”
He introduces himself without giving his name. A lawyer. A firm. A wife. A dog he didn’t want until it was gone.
“I don’t know if I’m still me,” he says. “Or just the story I tell myself.”
Ghost Boy nods. “Maybe I’m what’s left when I leave the room.”
They stand in the hallway like two statues not ready to crack.
“You looking for a real connection?” Ghost Boy asks.
The lawyer leaves without answering.
Ghost Boy steps into the night.
The lights scream. The signs leer. The city pretends it isn’t dying.
But he isn’t thinking about that.
He’s thinking about her.
Not Aria. The other one. The one with the tarot cards. The one who laughed like she already knew how his story ends.
He wants to find her. Not for love. Not for fate. For something rarer.
Honesty.
He wants a real friend.
For now, that might be enough.
As for the author: I need a break.
Until next time. Thanks for reading.
June 4, 2025
Some stories don’t know where they begin, let alone end. It's a unique freedom to meander, an artistic indulgence rarely afforded to those residing outside of California.
This is a story about the masks we all wear, whether we care to admit to it or not. The good news is, if you’re looking for a hero, you might find one here. And if you’re looking for me, the author, in some form, well… you might find that too.
But be forewarned: this isn’t a memoir, and it’s not fiction either, at least not entirely.
It’s more like a signal intercepted at the edge of its frequency. A fever dream. A late-night confessional, wrapped in the fabric of L.A. bullshit and its accompanying freeway static.
In other words, don’t be fooled. Just because what's about to unfold isn’t “real” doesn’t mean it isn't true.
So let's meet our hero, Ghost Boy. He doesn't know if he's dead, alive, or some place in between. He’s been told more than once that his face reminds people of someone they used to know. But no one ever agrees on who.
Ghost Boy sits in traffic on the 101. The headlights and brake lights and splashes of gaudy neon bleed across the landscape as he accelerates toward the Gower Street exit. To him, the city always feels like a performance in search of a director, a fashion magazine in need of an editor.
“L.A. isn’t a city even in the traditional sense,” he whispers to himself. “It’s a long-range transmission bouncing off of things that resemble pavement and luxury retail.”
There's one advantage to L.A. traffic jams: they give you time to ponder the eternal verities.
“Sometimes L.A. speaks in static,” he continues. “The palm trees are the daily dose of reality, an inverted and highly subliminal reminder of the outside world. The flora and fauna and greenery remind us where we are. And help us forget where we've been.”
Ghost Boy is one of these people now, for whom the line separating what's fake from what's authentic is a mere distinction without a difference.
He’s about to meet a tarot card reader who he suspects had a major meltdown for the whole world to see on a live stream, now living under an assumed identity.
It's after hours and not all that hard to find parking. It is a free country after all. The meditation teachers really do know a “secret”:
It's only as bad or as good as you want it to be, in L.A., and life in general.
Now he walks through the streets of East Hollywood at night. The air around him flickers, like an old video tape wearing thin.
He remembers his own meltdowns from the past, determined to move on from them.
He looks like someone who had once been famous. An actor who’d played a killer, subtly.
Or maybe a savior, depending on how you cut the reel. He smiles at strangers like he knows something about them. He does. Or he thinks he does. He's a mystery.
A hot girl walks past. Very casual. He undresses her with his eyes. In his mind’s eye. Without staring, and without thinking, he can feel the presence of what's under her form fitting shirt and pants.
This girl is not who he's looking for tonight, however. He found her earlier in the day, online. She has over ninety thousand followers, and somehow still made time to DM him back.
Now he's walking along a dark and scary residential street, where it curves past an abandoned car wash.
It’s almost midnight, and L.A. is playing one of its favorite roles: glamorous, modernist ruin.
Ghost Boy is not going to see a tarot card reader because he (or I) believe in magic, but because we’ve both run out of practical solutions to our problems. He found her channel on YouTube during one of his insomnia spells.
She said something about returning to the beginning of a timeline. That if you feel lost, you should go back to where the story started going wrong.
And he knew she meant him. So he went with his gut.
Her name on the channel is @oracle.of.sunset, but that’s not her real name, of course. Nothing in this world is real, except the emotions kept at a safe distance, named when it feels appropriate.
She looks like someone who used to be famous but got bored with it. Perfectly calibrated messiness. You can’t tell if she’s enlightened or completely full of it.
And honestly, that’s part of the draw.
He waits outside her studio, which is really just a converted storefront next to a laundromat. The neon flickers overhead.
Her window has blackout curtains with moons and eyes and triangles painted on them. The kind of place you don’t walk into unless you’re prepared to walk out changed, or disappointed. Or eaten.
She appears in silhouette first, walking like someone who knows she's being watched.
The streetlight catches the edge of her jacket, bouncing off a gleaming rhinestone crystal shaped like a crescent moon.
When he gets to the door, he hesitates. He doesn't trust her. He checks his phone, ostensibly looking for a cryptic message, but really seeking a distraction. A slight pause, then he keeps going.
She lets him in without a word. The place smells like sage and mildew. There are too many mirrors, none of them aligned.
Then, a look - she thinks she recognizes him. “You look familiar. Do I know you?” she inquires.
“No,” he replies, not missing a beat. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Something’s off about her, like she's just slightly out of place but fitting in anyway. She looks like a preppy college chick. A sorority girl who's seriously slumming, keeping her less adventurous and free-spirited sisters guessing.
And having fun with it, by all appearances.
Her performativity at the start is almost uncomfortable for Ghost Boy, who thrives on authentic connections. She’s too polished. Her laugh is too big. Her timing is too spot-on.
“Most people are not ready for what the cards tell them” she says with a sidelong glance at the curtains as if someone had just left.
She leads him up creaky stairs and into the tarot studio.
Everything is perfectly curated. Moonstones glistening under track lights. An antique velvet couch that looks like it’s never been sat on. There’s incense burning, two kinds at once, like magic wands warring for attention.
Her eyeliner is immaculately applied, cat-like. She’s smiling already, like she knows the camera’s on, even though there isn’t one.
“Alright, Ghost Boy,” she says, drawing out each syllable like she’s casting a spell. “You actually showed up. Didn't expect this. But it's cool.”
The laugh comes quick - big and bold and practiced.
He nods and takes a seat.
"So let's get started with your reading," she says, eyes analyzing his face like a scanner at a checkout line.
His eyes are drawn to her figure. She's thin and toned, in runner’s shape. Eye contact again after a brief bedroom fantasy with her in it.
“What were you doing before this?” he asks.” But she's not prepared for vulnerability.
“Excuse me?” she replies, defensively.
“I'm being rude. That's not what I meant. Sorry. Are you from LA.?”
“Not originally, no. Can we move on?”
“You bet. I'm excited. Let's do this.”
“Sounds good. What would you like to know?”
He shrugs. "I want to know who I am."
"Good," she says. "That means you’re close.”
She waves her hands around subtly like a magician, all flourish and no weight. “Tonight’s a waning moon,” she says, voice low and dramatic. “Perfect for shedding illusions.”
He watches her, silently. She’s already talking too much. But yet he's drawn to her. She strikes something primal in him, an emotional resonance that puts him off balance, confused and frustrated but wanting more.
“I follow you,” he says finally.
Her brow lifts. She assumes social media.
“No,” he says. “I followed you after your livestream. The one from the hospital. You remember?”
For a second her eyes flash with something like fear. Then she smiles again, too fast.
“You’re confusing me with someone else, sweetie.”
She pulls the deck out of a velvet pouch. Shuffles slowly, deliberately, like the cards are heavy with something ancient.
The reading begins. She taps into the depths of his psyche. There’s talk, of course. Always talk. People said things.
He’d been accused of all kinds of things. But not in court. Just in whispers. Some of them online. Some of them sounded like poetry.
She draws three cards.
"The Fool," she says. "New beginnings. Blind faith. A jump into the unknown. That’s you."
He nods. It fits.
"The Moon. Illusions. Secrets. Things unclear. That’s also you."
He smirks. "I get it. I’m complicated."
She doesn’t smile. "And the third. Death. Transformation. Endings that are beginnings."
Apprehension. There's something dark in his energy. “I should say that this card is usually about transformation.”
"Do I die at the end of this story?" he asks.
She leans forward. Her voice is lower now. "Maybe you already did."
There’s a silence between them. For a second, he feels like he's lost somewhere between this life and the next.
“But don't worry. It's just a disclaimer.”
“So it's not about me, then?”
“No, I don't think so.”
The Moon card. She holds it up and towards him. "This one is yours. Take it. Keep it. It’s not about answers. It’s about questions." He goes against his better judgement, accepting her gift.
This wasn't the first time he sat across from someone who claimed to know who he is. Or was. Maybe this one would be right.
“I'm not sure if I've just woken up or fallen deeper into someone else's dream,” he says to himself…
Outside, he sits on the curb with the Moon card in his hand, fluttering slightly in the wind. It doesn’t fly away. It just trembles.
He considers his next move. There's something going on under this girl's mask and he’s intrigued.
A swaying palm tree brings him back to reality, reminding him of simpler, happier times back home, away from the land of dreams, where illumination is tantamount to deception, and none of it ever made sense to begin with.
He notices no one’s around. “L.A. speaks in perfect clarity,” he surmises, “to both the broken and the beautiful. It’s so amazingly radical at times that you start to question the very foundations of whatever you assume to resemble sanity.”
He rubs his hands together, searching for friction, proof that he’s still made of skin and bone, not vapor and memory.
That's where I'll leave you for now.
I'm not the most reliable narrator, not because I'm a liar, but because I'm still figuring it out. And there’s a trick of the light in everything I write.
So, keep that in mind.
I don’t know what’s coming next. But I think I’ve started something. Or maybe something has started me.
June 1, 2025
Welcome to Ghost Boy Diaries
I’ve always had trouble with masks - how easily they stick, how long they stay on, how hard it is to remember your face underneath.
For years, I played a version of myself that wasn’t quite real. Not entirely fake, either. Just... edited. Sharpened in places, softened in others.
I lived through performance on social media, in relationships, in cities where everyone curates themselves until even the sadness looks good on camera.
But that’s not what this space is for.
Here, I’ll be writing from the inside out. Short stories. Fragments. Monologues. Observations. Emotional weather reports.
Most of it will live somewhere between fiction and memoir, rooted in a character I call Ghost Boy: a drifter, an aspiring screenwriter in L.A., someone looking for real connection in a world full of filtered images and beautiful lies.
He’s not me, but he’s carrying some of my old luggage.
You might see shades of the quiet things we don’t say out loud when we’re trying to be impressive. This is about what’s true, not what’s “important.”
If that resonates, subscribe. Read. Skim. Say nothing. Or write back.
Either way, thank you for being here. You found this for a reason. So did I.
—James