It's secret confession week, and I've got a doozy.

Now, my ex-husband was big on getting his own way. If he could get away with it, he'd do it. If he could lie about it, he would. If he had a stray thought about butt-fucking his "true love" he told me about it. (I was not said true love) If he had an urge to fuck something and it held still long enough, he would.

Finally, I'd had just enough. Just enough of being talked down to, just enough insults, just enough abuse, that I stepped out.

I'm not proud of it, but I don't regret it one bit. Just one night, I wanted to feel like I was special. I wanted to feel loved, and like the person I was with was actually seeing ME and not the shadow of someone else.

I was on birth control, and, like a moron, neither of us worried about a condom, because we were, again, morons.

Though, if I'd had a condom, it might have looked like I was planning on doing that, and I hadn't been. In this case, "it just happened" was more than just a cliche.

But I didn't stop it, and if I had it to do over again, I still wouldn't stop. I'd do it all again, with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

After it was done, we parted ways, and it was just a fond memory to me until I realized my period was late.

Clue the little voice going "I told you so", because that EPT flashed positive faster than Superman could leap a tall building.

I didn't tell the real father, I didn't even tell my now-ex-but-then-husband (here on out referred to as NEBTH because I'm lazy like that). The father was in no shape to handle the news of "you knocked up someone else's wife" and my ex-husband was out of town on business for the year, so I wasn't going to have to explain a baby bump away.

I started figuring out how to tell the NEBTH the truth, and how to get away without a huge fight that ended in my blood on walls and him arrested for a domestic.

I had seen him (NEBTH) and had sex with him a few weeks after I concieved, so I could have passed off the baby as his if I'd wanted, at least for the first year until the baby stopped being a 'baby' and turned into their own person.

(I like to think it says good things about me as a person that I did not realize that until a few years after the fact, mainly because I'd rather chew glass than tell that big of a lie. Soap opera diva I'm not.)

And, when I lost the baby, I'm not sure who I grieved for harder. Me, or the unknowing man who would have made a great dad if he'd known.

My Mom said that she saw my Grandfather and her Father after they died. To be honest, I kind of thought she had an over-active, grief-stricken imagination.

A few years ago, her husband’s aunt passed away. Mom and Aunt had been very close and Mom started hearing things in her house. Something that sounded like Aunt’s laugh. I again thought that Mom was just really sad and this was her way of coping.

I was talking to my Stepdad on the phone one day and he said that he woke up the night before because he thought Mom was talking loudly on the phone but she was asleep on the couch when he went into the living room. I figure that Mom has talked to him so much about hearing Aunt that he’s starting to dream about it.

About a week later my sister calls me and she’s freaking out and she asks me to call Mom’s phone number and then call her back. I do. She asks what I heard on the machine and I told her it was the generic message that Mom keeps on there that came with the machine.

My sister had called the number right before calling me and instead of the generic message, there was Aunt saying “You’ve reached Aunt, leave a message!”

We're all fascinated by what we cannot explain. Whether it's vampires (side note: Edward Cullen is NOT a vampire. He is a creepy stalker douche bag who needs to meet Buffy or Blade or even old skool Anita Blake in a dark alley), werewolves, ghosts, monsters, or God, we love to take things on faith.

Because, truly, that is what is comes down to. Faith. Belief in something beyond us, beyond the basic senses and it's something we have true control over. We either believe in something, or we don't. We can have a weak belief, or one that is strong enough to survive the test of time.

I believe in ghosts. Places I've lived... I don't have a choice in it.

Two little girls I would baby sit when I was fourteen, they would talk to "the old lady" all the time. Every night I was there, I'd be reading them a story, and they're talking to the old lady. At first, I thought the old lady was simply kids being kids. How children imagine things that aren't there.

Then I saw the old lady; I'd broken up with my first love, and I was still weepy over the whole thing (really, when is a teenage girl *not* weepy over a boy?) and I was holding the littlest girl in my lap, smelling her hair, when the old lady appeared on the chair across from me. She had the saddest smile on her face, her eyes swallowed up by wrinkled skin. I almost dropped the little girl in fright, and the old woman disappeared. I never again sat in that chair.

My very first apartment, I had a girlfriend spend the night (we'd had fights with our mutual partners and were having a 'men are scum' night), and after we went to bed, neither of us could sleep. We lay in that queen size bed, on our bellies, with pillows tucked under us just right and snuggled together for maximum warmth. Just as we'd doze off, we'd be jolted away by an old woman who got a thrill out of seeing us jump. I swear, if a ghost could laugh out loud, she'd have been rolling around cackling like a crazed witch.

This same old woman would check on my neighbors daughter when she was sick. She'd rub my forehead when I had a headache. Not a real rub, and not on command, but when I would be truly ill and want only to pass out to get away from the ache, I'd feel her touch me between the eyes. It didn't make the pain go away, but it reminded me of when I was small, and I'd feel better.

In that same side, I've felt the angry presence of someone who would not rub my forehead when I was hurting. If they had the chance, I fully believe they'd have shoved a spike in my eye and called it a day. Vanishing pools of blood on my bedroom floor, the sensation that I was being choked when I was completely alone, and shadows moving around my bed at night that had me terrified enough I'd leave during the witching hour and sleep in my car.

Not everyone caught in that forever twilight was at peace with their leaving.