Ghost Towns

I drove through Nevada last month, past Bodie and its arrested decay, and I thought about abandonment.

Ghost towns don't happen overnight. They empty slowly, like a bathtub with a hairline crack—first a trickle, then a steady drain, until one day the porcelain shows white and cold at the bottom. Someone leaves for better work. Someone else follows a lover to Denver. The schoolteacher retires. The postman gets reassigned. And then there's just whoever's left, watering plants in empty apartments above shuttered storefronts.

I sat in my car outside the general store in Bodie—now a museum piece, cans of beans still lined up on shelves like soldiers waiting for orders that will never come—and I felt the fluttering moth behind my ribs when someone takes too long to text back. When dinner plans get cancelled twice in a row. When you know you’re forcing laughter when trying to hold onto something that’s already slipping away.

The thing about abandonment is that it rarely looks like the movies—no dramatic slamming of doors or boxes thrown on lawns. More often, it’s the slow withdrawal of attention, the gradual decrease in invitations, the way someone's enthusiasm for your stories dims like a bulb losing wattage. You become background music in their life until finally, you're just silence.

In Bodie, they call it "arrested decay"—maintaining buildings exactly as they were left, preventing further deterioration but never restoring them to their former glory. I think I do this with relationships: keeping the memory of connection preserved exactly as it was, afraid to let it crumble completely but unable to breathe new life into it.

There's a specific exhaustion to being in a world that demands constant performance. Sometimes I just want to be asleep, in that liminal space where my body remembers what it felt like to be held without needing to reciprocate, to be still without being lazy, to disappear without being missed. I’ve tried to find that space to be nobody’s anybody in life, too — slipped away quietly when the weight of someone’s need pressed in like humid air. Not all at once, but message by message, until I became just another inhabitant of their personal ghost town.

But here's what I learned sitting in that California heat, surrounded by the bones of a once-thriving community: ghost towns fascinate us precisely because they make visible what we usually can't see—the way presence becomes absence, the beautiful terrible fragility of the places we build together.

I drove home thinking about roots and mobility, about how some plants die if you transplant them and others thrive wherever they're planted. I thought about community as something you choose to tend rather than something that simply happens to you.

That night, I texted three people I'd been meaning to reach out to for weeks. Two texted back immediately. One never responded. And that's the thing about fighting becoming a ghost town—you have to be willing to risk the silence, to keep showing up even when you're not sure anyone's home. You have to believe that somewhere, someone is still watering the plants, still turning on the lights, still hoping that footsteps on the porch mean company is coming.

Because the opposite of a ghost town isn't a bustling city. It's just one person who decides to stay, to tend the stores and sweep the sidewalks and keep the lights on, believing that life—real, messy, connected life—is still possible here.