You know what I see when I look at certain men?
Ghosts.
Expensive ghosts in beautiful suits, driving cars that cost more than most people's houses, checking watches that could fund a startup. They've optimised everything except the one thing that matters — they've disappeared.
Not in the cinematic sense. They're still on the calls, still closing the deals, still holding court in the restaurants where the waiters know their name. But the conversations are about nothing: the new kitchen extension, the ski trip, the consultant who "finally sorted the supply chain."
The food tastes like cardboard. The wine could be vinegar for all they care. They train not to feel alive, but to keep the gut away. They buy things they don't even like because those are the things men like them are supposed to have.
I can recognise them because I was one. Mine was an elegant haunting — a life upholstered in silk and shadow. On paper it looked enviable: black tie seasons, high-gloss deals, a passport worn soft at the edges. But it was an affair with an illusion, a quiet death by a thousand small acceptances. I was performing intimacy with a system that never really knew me, and never cared to.
The thing about being a ghost is you don't feel the moment you fade. You just wake up one day and realise you've been walking through someone else's dream with your eyes open.
Jeff was one too. On the surface: the game won, the receipts to prove it. But I noticed the fracture — the Rolex glances, the smile that never reached the eyes, the weight of hours he couldn't name. His marriage gone, his daughter growing up on carefully scheduled weekends, his life a loop of work, drink, distraction.
One day he vanished — not from life, but from the loop.
Months later we caught up again. He told me he had been somewhere that stripped him down to the man before the titles, the money, the armour. Not a resort. Not a curated "experience." Four places. Four trials. Four chances to come back different.
He did.
We met around Beacon Hill, his daughter beside him on her bike, helmet askew. At the top he grinned like a man about to rob a bank. We tore down the hill in a blur of mud and sunlight, no thought of meetings or deals, just the rush of being alive.
You can stay a ghost forever. Most do. Some don't.