i text dead people for advice

i text dead people for advice. not because they answer— they don’t— but because they never interrupt. i tell my grandfather about the boy who left mid-winter and how my ribcage still clicks shut like a locket when someone new gets close. he was buried in silk, but i like to imagine he’d wear combat boots now and tell me to run before love swallowed me whole. i ask Sylvia what to do with the hurt that has no name, the ache that sits like a houseguest i never invited. i send her my poems at 3 a.m.— the ones with too much blood and not enough metaphor. she doesn’t reply. but somehow, i feel seen. sometimes i text my childhood self. she’s dead too, in a way. i ask her if the monster was really under the bed or if it slept in a room that never unlocked. she sends back a drawing of a girl with no mouth. i know what she means. my inbox is a graveyard. a collection of ghosts who hold more kindness than most living hands. they never leave me on read. they never ask me to explain my sadness in bullet points. i text dead people for advice because the living tend to offer solutions when all i want is for someone to hold the question.