I do not believe in ghosts, but I will often admit that I do, because people expect me to.

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Except for the people who don't; in these cases I aver myself completely ghost-free.

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Already we have entered the realm of the fictive.

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The thing I enjoyed the most when I was a child was looking into the sun's glare, something I did so much that it seems as if all of my childhood is white-hot, sere, brilliant at the edges.

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In the Jewish tradition, we place pebbles on the gravestones of those we've lost to mark our visits to their final resting places.

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After attending a string of funerals when I was three or four, I began placing little lines of pebbles on everything—tree roots, plastic chairs, the foot of my bed—creating little ghosts wherever I went.

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Most of these pebbles were later scattered by my careless feet.

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I remember I always seemed to be in the bathtub when we heard that another distant relative had died. Lukewarm water, muffled sound, spreading the soapsuds on my face and pretending to shave.

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But back to that sunlight and the way it used to pool in through the square of bathroom window on summer afternoons when the air was hot and the earth was cancerous.

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The sound of the screen door clatter; sickness, whine, and croak.

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Here's the truth that gets told: dangling in my mother's arms, I sang Happy Birthday at one of these funerals. At that age, candles and music and flowers had only one referent.

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It annoyed me when this story was told, even when I was young. I thought it made me seem like I didn't know how to grieve.

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Yet, even today, I've never cried at a funeral.

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Here's the truth that doesn't get told: that summer, the summer of the funerals, was the one when I began to cover my whole body in sheets at night to protect against the ghosts in my room, when I used to whisper I don't want to die over and over again in the thickened darkness of my room until I was too exhausted to sleep.

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That was the year I was paralyzed by the thought of sleepless ghosts.

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Which I later cured by reasoning that even ghosts must sleep, and if they slept, why shouldn't they sleep at night? They were people, after all.

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And I began to think that these people were distant relations to me, that I'd spent maybe a few holidays with them over the course of a few years of my childhood, but that my parents had spent far longer with them in all the years they'd lived, and I began to feel selfish in my grief.

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Selfish in my pursuit of ghosts too: I told my parents I saw them everywhere, waiting outside, crosshatched by the screen door, hidden among the swaying branches of the trees, in the glint of light off the tail of a cruising jetliner.

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These were all, of course, lies.

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The last funeral that summer was my grandmother's, a woman I'd barely known—she'd spent most of my life in the hospital. Years later, I insisted I had memories of her, at the beach, at the bowling alley, although I came to discover that these were gleaned from photographs of her and my brother, and my grandmother and I had never actually done any of these things.

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In college, I used to throw Ghost Parties with my friend, two times a year at ghost hour, the hour that appeared or was taken away on your cell phone when daylight savings time happened. By this time ghosts were a joke.

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Last year, I read a newspaper article and discovered that my friend had died. It had been months since we'd last talked, he'd been in and out of rehab, and I'd been too exhausted by my own life to call him often.

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I didn't cry at his funeral. And I didn't see any ghosts either.

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I didn't feel guilty. I didn't feel selfish. But I began collecting pebbles again and saying his name and leaving cold little stones in places I'd soon forget.

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For the family tree unit in fifth grade I got the lowest grade of the year because I didn't complete it. My tree stopped at my grandparents. Why don't you have anything more? the teacher asked me, and I told her that my family didn't have anything, that my family name was changed at Ellis Island and we couldn't trace anything further back, that lost ghosts were hidden in the branches. I felt embarrassed by a family that had so assimilated that it had erased its past completely. We never did Jewish things. And yet we placed pebbles on our graves.

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I have tried to erase my past too. I have tried to reinvent myself and accept the changes that some would make to my name; I have stayed up all night trying to defeat sleepless ghosts; I have prayed to will ghosts into existence where there are none. There are days when I stare into the sun and swear I can see the ghosts of everyone in my life who's gone before me, flickering and fading in the corona of light. There are days when I forget the parties and the false memories and all of my ghosts. There are days when I walk on cold ground and kick up pebbles with the heels of my shoes and hear their faint skitterings on the dirt behind me.

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I sat down to think of 25 things about me and ended up with 26 ghosts.