By Eva Dias Costa in Jung at Heart — 03 Oct 2025

Don't Embarrass Me

‘How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.’
– J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

The ghost is small.
Still wears Velcro shoes.
Still asks what clouds are made of.

He sits beside me
when I stop at red lights –
near the place
I once dropped him off.

The real child is elsewhere –
taller now,
with keys,
opinions,
and the wrong coat for the weather.

But this one
keeps returning
where the road forgets
he's moved on.

Sometimes I pack his lunch
before I remember.
Sometimes,
when I open the window,
I wait for a voice
to say it’s too cold.

You’d expect them to grow,
these ghosts.
But they still frown the same way,
and queue for instructions
on how to be missed properly.

The living leave gently –
but their shadows,
uninvited,
keep turning up
as if school were still in session.

And where do I file this?
Under Misplaced?
Malfunction?
Incorrect child detected
in current environment?

I try to archive him –
labelled, sorted,
sealed in chronological order.
My system is porous.

He slips across decades
like a smudge in the catalogue,
wearing a T-shirt he outgrew,
repeating a line I haven’t heard in years.

How do I label this:
the way he ran down the steps,
the violin strap off his shoulder,
a question half-formed in his mouth,
hair wet from swimming, or rain?

Which system do I use
to label the mornings
he sat with me at the kitchen table,
holding a Nintendo in one hand
and my silence in the other?

I want to keep track
of who my child is now,
not confuse him
with the blond, curly-haired boy
who once asked
if fish slept.

But memory is bad at indexing.
It cross-references his voice at five
with his stride at twenty-five.
It calls up the wrong version
when the phone rings.

Where do I store
the smell of his pyjamas,
the sound of ‘milk’
muffled by sleep?

My body keeps these fragments
like archived software,
no longer supported,
impossible to delete.

He is not lost –
only growing.
Yet the loss feels no less.

I close the folder,
update the entry,
note the discrepancy:
child present in duplicate,
across incompatible years.

Still,
when the streetlamp flickers on,
I see him waiting,
Velcro shoes damp with rain.

I try not to wave,
lest he turn,
say ‘Mum’–
in that tone children use –
‘don’t embarrass me’.
As if haunting went both ways.

The real child is ahead,
taller, impatient,
checking his phone.

This one stays –
quiet,
persistent,
still expecting a lift home.