Matt Hazard

I would love to say this is in some way satire, but alas, it is not. For it’s no longer the warm embrace of my wife’s arms that comforts me at night, but instead the chilling grip of knowledge that ghosts dwell in my home that keeps me awake. That, after all, is the only explanation; it’s simply ghosts that reside in my garage where they maliciously drain the battery in my wife’s car, since I’ve been assured there is no possible way that she could have left the lights on.

My belief in the haunting began not long after I was making my nightly routine checks before bed. You know, lock the doors, make sure the dogs are safely in the house, and check the garage for ghosts. Normal stuff.

That’s when I noticed the dome light was on in her car.

Naturally, I went upstairs to let her know of her mistake. That was a mistake.

The Coles Notes version of what transpired up there was a lot of repeating the same sentences in various creative ways. I tried – what I learned later was not – reasoning with her that she must have left it on by mistake. My takeaway from her plethora of creative verbiage is that there was a zero percent chance that she could have turned that light on. Not only was it physically and insurmountably impossible, but I’m wrong about some other stuff also.

So, taking a moment of pause after hooking up the trickle charger to her battery for an overnight remedy, I came to terms that it’s not exactly sarcastic to say that I kind of do believe in ghosts now.

Come on man, you don’t actually believe your garage is haunted, do you?

Look, I’ve been a final round contestant in debates with my wife for over a decade now, and I somehow always wind up taking home silver. I’ve been wrong so many times, I don’t even remember what it feels like to be right anymore. So after our fifteen minute discussion, where I realized I was wrong to imagine that she could have accidentally turned on the dome light by bumping it with her head when she leaned back into the car to grab her laptop, I now believe in ghosts.

Because even now, as I type this and she glares at me from the couch, ghosts just kinda make sense at this point.