''Ghosted by a Dead Man''

By [ISRAR khan]

I met Elias on a Thursday in April, the kind of day that smells like rain even when the sky is clear. We were both waiting in line for overpriced espresso at a pop-up café in Brooklyn. He wore a charcoal coat and a crooked smile, and when he spoke, his voice had the kind of depth you feel in your chest.

Our conversation started with coffee preferences and ended with a dinner date. It was fast, but something about Elias felt like a rewind button — like I'd known him in another life.

Over the next three months, we were inseparable. We had our routines: Tuesday night wine at his apartment, Saturday mornings at the used bookstore on 7th, lazy Sundays walking without direction. He told me his mother was a pianist who died young, his father an absent man with a drinking problem. He rarely talked about his past in detail, but when he did, it came out in scattered puzzle pieces.

Elias didn’t have social media. No Instagram, no Facebook, not even a LinkedIn page. “I like to keep my life analog,” he said once. I laughed, but it left an odd taste in my mouth.

Then one day — he disappeared.

It started with a missed text reply. Then a full day. Then three. Calls went to voicemail. His apartment was locked, no answer when I knocked. I assumed the worst, then hoped for the best. Maybe he just needed space. Maybe it was me.

After two weeks, I gave up. And then I did something I hadn’t before — I Googled him.

The search results hit me like a punch to the gut.

Elias Monroe, 29, died in a car accident in 2020.

There was a photo. Same eyes, same jawline. Same lopsided smile.

But that was impossible. I had met Elias in 2025.

I double-checked the obituary. The article said he had been a poet. Lived in Brooklyn. Same bookstore we visited. Same street he said he lived on. The funeral was held in May—five years ago.

For a week, I didn’t leave my apartment. I told no one. I thought maybe I had been tricked. Maybe someone was impersonating him. But there was no social media trail, no paper trail, nothing. Elias Monroe, as I had known him, had vanished — and legally, had already been gone for half a decade.

Then things got stranger.

One evening, I came home to find a note on my kitchen table. I live alone. It was written in his handwriting.

“Don’t look for me. Just remember.”

I should have felt fear. Instead, I cried. For the first time since he vanished, I let it hit me — the weight of loving someone who might not have ever really existed.

But he had. I knew he had. I remembered the warmth of his hand, the rhythm of his laugh, the way he always turned his head to the left before saying something serious.

I started to notice the signs.

A record on the turntable I hadn’t played in months, spinning slowly when I woke up. A book left open to the page he once read aloud. The scent of his cologne hanging in the air like a question.

Maybe grief plays tricks. Or maybe the veil between life and whatever comes after is thinner than we like to believe.

I don't tell many people this story. The ones I have either think I made it up, or worse, think I'm still lost in denial.

But I know what I felt. And sometimes, when the city quiets down around 2 AM, I feel him again — like a memory brushing against the present.

Some people say being ghosted is the worst kind of pain. The absence. The lack of closure.

I was ghosted — literally — by a dead man.

And somehow, that’s how I know he loved me.

Author’s Note: Some people leave quietly. Others leave impossibly. And some... never truly leave at all.