I’m not even sure why I’m putting this down, what good it’ll do, just… it’s stuck, you know? Like a burr under the saddle. I was thinking about that college kid, the one my grandson, bless his heart, told me about, how this young fella spends all his waking hours arguing with strangers online about some podcaster. Defending him, like a goddamn pit bull, against every little whisper or perceived slight. My grandson said he gets this fire in his belly, feels like he’s protecting a friend, a lifelong friend, even though he’s never met the man. And I felt a pang, just a dull throb in an old heart, because I know that feeling. Oh, I know it intimately. It took me right back, right back to when I was, hell, probably younger than that kid. Maybe a bit older, in my early twenties, after my first husband left and I was just… floundering. This was back when folks still wrote letters, before the internet made everyone a goddamn expert. I had a pen pal, this woman from up north, lived in a town even smaller than ours, if you can believe that. We wrote for years, shared everything. Or, I thought we did. She talked about her life, her husband, her kids, and I just… I clung to it. Defended her, even to myself, when little things didn't quite add up. My sister, she’s long gone now, God rest her soul, she used to say, “Martha, you’re making that woman into something she ain’t, something you need her to be.” And I’d snap at her, I’d get this rage, this fierce, protective instinct. Like my sister was attacking *me*, not just questioning a phantom friend. It wasn’t rational, not one bit. My sister, she understood the psychological underpinnings, the displacement, the projection… I just called it loyalty, back then. A fierce, unwavering loyalty to someone I barely knew, someone who, in hindsight, was probably just indulging a lonely old hen. And now, seeing this kid, pouring his heart and soul into defending a voice on a goddamn radio, it just… it makes me ache. Not for him, not exactly, but for that part of me that was so desperate to connect, so eager to pour all that unspent devotion into something, anything, that felt like mine. Something I could protect, because Lord knows, back then, everything else felt like it was slipping through my fingers. And the sad, goddamn truth is, I never stopped doing it, not really. Just shifted the target, found new faces, new causes, to pour that same desperate, protective energy into. It’s a pattern, isn’t it? An enduring maladaptive coping mechanism, I suppose, if you want to get clinical about it. Still, even now, it's hard to look at that feeling, that fierce, almost violent urge to defend, and not feel a little bit of that old warmth, that bittersweet comfort. It’s a hell of a thing, to love a ghost.