I am continually haunted by ghosts of my past.

And I know I'm not the only one. The question is, what do we do with ghosts of our pasts?

Coming home every summer from school is an experience only to be described as both a blessing and a curse. A blessing as I have months free from the shackles of research paper writing. A curse as I now have months of summer work ahead of me to pay for my later months of research paper writing. A blessing because I finally get to spend quality time with my family and my few and true friends I left behind. A curse because I know that being home means I can't avoid the ghouls of another life that creep around town.

In fact, I've been confronted with multiple displays of days gone by in my own summer workplace. Some ghosts are friendlier than others, but others are sinister, and some just serve as pins for pricking small holes in your bubble of new reality.

When I see these familiar frames of ghastly visage, I'm immediately blinded memories I'd thought were long forgotten. I'm hit with a wave of fresh pain and anger. I wonder when I will stop being haunted by those who failed to follow me, and, resigned to their permanency, I wonder what can I do about them now.

How does one get rid of ghosts? An exorcist? Burning sage? By telling them to leave? I'm afraid those tactics don't work when the apparitions you're fighting are very much alive. Or when you find yourself unwilling to forgive and forget.

I left my hometown two years ago in passive resentment and with high hopes in order to pursue a life far different than the one I'd been living. And in college life, I found a new version of myself, one who I thought was older, wiser, more aware and more reflective. My new self no longer lived in my old high school self's shell, and she was thriving on life without what she'd once needed to grow.

But when I come home, no one knows about my new self. And I sulk angrily about fighting to be seen as my better version, except, when I come face to face with my ghosts. Here, I am the old me and they are the old them.

And just like that, I am forced to realize that if I'm still bitter over events that happened to me in the past, and if I'm still harboring hatred for these physical phantoms, then I am the ghost. I am the one who slips on my old skin and roams about with my memories of cobwebbed bias.

When it comes to the past, make peace with it. We need not hold on to the anger and pain of yesterday if we are living in the now. We need not zip up our old skins so tightly that we cannot see the new beings stepping out of their own corpses.