The Things We Leave Behind

My sister's laughter started haunting me three days after I cleaned out her apartment. Not her ghost – I'm fairly certain Katie isn't dead. She's just gone, somewhere in Southeast Asia according to her last Instagram post, "finding herself" or whatever people call it when they abandon their lives without warning.

The laughter comes at odd moments: when I'm washing dishes, riding the elevator, trying to sleep. It's not malevolent or mocking – it's her real laugh, the one that used to bubble up from deep in her chest when she found something genuinely funny. The sound follows me like a persistent echo, starting just behind my left ear and fading into the distance.

I first heard it while sorting through her abandoned belongings, deciding what to keep, what to donate, what to throw away. Her lease was up in two weeks, and as her only family in the city, the task fell to me. I was folding one of her old college sweatshirts when the laughter rippled through the empty apartment, so clear and present that I spun around, expecting to find her standing there.

But the apartment was empty, just as it had been since she left six months ago with nothing but a backpack and a cryptic note: "Need to figure some things out. Don't worry. Love you."

Of course I worried. That's what older sisters do.

The laughter came again as I was boxing up her art supplies – dozens of half-used tubes of acrylic paint, brushes with bristles stiff from neglect, sketchbooks filled with unfinished ideas. Katie had always been the artistic one, while I followed our parents into accounting. "The practical sister," she used to call me, not quite managing to hide the slight note of pity in her voice.

This time, the laughter was followed by words: "Remember the time you tried to paint a sunset?"

I did remember. I was twelve, she was nine, and I was determined to prove I could be creative too. The resulting painting looked more like a tragic accident involving orange juice and grape jelly. Katie had laughed then too, but not unkindly. She'd spent the rest of the afternoon teaching me about color mixing and perspective. The painting never got better, but it didn't matter – I'd discovered I preferred being the audience to her art anyway.

That night, after filling my car with boxes of Katie's life, I dreamed of her paintings. In the dream, they moved and shifted, colors bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain. I woke to the sound of her laughter and the faint smell of turpentine.

The haunting grew stronger over the next few days. At work, my calculator started spitting out strings of numbers that, when I squinted, looked like tiny stick figures dancing across the display. My coffee developed swirling patterns that resembled Katie's abstract pieces. The spreadsheet on my computer briefly transformed into one of her charcoal sketches before snapping back to rows and columns of data.

"You're working too hard," my colleague Marcus said when I mentioned the strange occurrences. "When's the last time you took a vacation?"

I couldn't remember. I'd been too busy being responsible, reliable Rebecca, the one who stayed put, paid her bills on time, and answered every one of our parents' worried phone calls about Katie.

The laughter followed me home, accompanied now by the scratch of pencil on paper and the subtle swoosh of paintbrushes in water. These weren't threatening sounds – they were the background music of my childhood, the soundtrack of countless hours spent watching Katie create while I did homework at her desk.

A week after clearing out her apartment, I found one of her sketchbooks in my bag. I was certain I'd packed it in a box bound for our parents' house, but there it was, wedged between my laptop and my lunch container. The pages were filled with her characteristic style: bold lines, unexpected colors, images that seemed to move when you looked at them too long.

"You kept everything, didn't you?" her voice whispered as I flipped through the pages. Not an echo this time, but clear words carried on the air conditioning breeze. "Every half-finished painting, every broken pencil, every dried-up marker."

"Someone had to," I said aloud to my empty living room. "You never threw anything away."

"Because you never know when you might need something," she replied, her voice tinged with that familiar stubborn certainty. "Art comes from chaos, Becca. You can't schedule inspiration."

I snorted. "No, but you can schedule rent payments. Utility bills. Adult responsibilities."

The air in my apartment grew thick with the smell of paint and possibility. One of my walls – the boring beige one I'd been meaning to decorate for years – suddenly sprouted colors: blooming roses in impossible shades, birds with mathematical equations for feathers, stars that looked like balanced ledgers.

I blinked and the wall was beige again, but something had shifted. The laughter in my head took on a different tone – not just amusement now, but invitation.

That night, I dreamed I was sitting in Katie's old room, watching her paint. But in the dream, I was also painting, creating impossible structures with numbers and spreadsheet cells, building cities out of decimal points and percentage signs. Our artwork merged and danced together on the walls, neither more valid than the other.

I woke to find my hands stained with phantom paint and the ghost of equations.

The haunting intensified. At work, my presentations developed artistic flourishes – pie charts that transformed into actual pies, bar graphs that became cityscapes, statistical models that flowered into gardens of data. My colleagues were impressed by my "creative approach to visual representation." My boss gave me a raise.

At home, my furniture rearranged itself into more aesthetically pleasing configurations. My clothes developed subtle patterns that shifted throughout the day. My windows showed different views depending on my mood – sometimes the actual street outside, sometimes Katie's memories of distant mountains, sometimes landscapes that existed only in the space between imagination and reality.

"You're getting it now," Katie's voice said one evening as I watched the sunset paint impossible colors across my kitchen walls. "Life isn't just about keeping things neat and organized."

"Says the girl who fled the country without forwarding her mail," I retorted.

Her laughter swirled around me like autumn leaves. "Maybe I left because everything was too neat, too organized. Maybe I needed some chaos to find my balance."

"And maybe I needed some chaos to find mine," I admitted.

The next morning, I bought art supplies. Not Katie's abandoned ones – those were hers, her unfinished possibilities, her abandoned potential. I needed my own. The art store clerk looked surprised when I told her I was a beginner.

"You have paint under your fingernails," she said. "And there's a smudge of charcoal on your cheek."

I touched my face, but felt nothing. In the store's mirror, though, I saw what she meant – traces of creativity had begun to leak through my practical exterior.

That weekend, instead of catching up on work or cleaning my apartment, I painted. Not well – I still had all the artistic talent of a distracted penguin – but with enthusiasm. I created spreadsheets that bloomed into flower gardens, ledgers that became labyrinths, tax forms that transformed into origami cranes.

Katie's laughter accompanied every brush stroke, not mocking but encouraging. The sounds of her artistic process – brushes swishing, pencils scratching, papers shuffling – provided a rhythm for my own clumsy attempts at creation.

"You don't have to be good at it," her voice assured me as I frowned at my latest attempt. "You just have to let it happen."

"Easy for you to say," I muttered. "You're talented."

"And you're practical. But who says those things have to be separate?"

I looked at my painting again. It was objectively terrible – a mishmash of colors and shapes that looked like a kindergartener's attempt at abstract expressionism. But hidden within the chaos were numbers and patterns, tiny perfect systems emerging from the disorder. It wasn't good art, but it was authentically mine.

The haunting changed after that. Instead of following me, it began to feel more like collaboration. Katie's laughter became a counterpoint to my own. Her artistic chaos balanced my mathematical precision. Together, we created something neither of us could have managed alone.

Two weeks later, I received a postcard from Thailand. Katie's familiar scrawl filled every available space: "Found what I was looking for. Turns out it was there all along. Coming home soon. P.S. Your artwork is getting better – the numbers add a nice touch."

I turned the postcard over. The image showed a temple covered in intricate patterns – geometry and art intertwined in perfect harmony. In the corner, barely visible unless you knew to look for it, was a tiny self-portrait of Katie, painting numbers into the temple's designs.

That night, my apartment filled with our mingled laughter – hers ethereal and free, mine grounded and precise. The walls bloomed with equations that grew into flowers, spreadsheets that became butterflies, budgets that danced like autumn leaves in the wind.

I realized then that she hadn't really abandoned her life – she'd just needed to step away to see it clearly. And maybe her temporary haunting wasn't about her at all. Maybe it was about showing me that there are many ways to be creative, many ways to be practical, and that the best path often lies in the space between.

When Katie finally came home two months later, she found me in my apartment, surrounded by paintings of mathematical gardens and precisely calculated chaos. She looked at my work, then at me, and smiled that bright smile I'd been hearing in my dreams.

"The practical sister," she said, but this time there was no pity in her voice – only recognition and love.

"The artistic one," I replied, handing her a paintbrush. "Want to collaborate?"

Her laughter, real and present now, filled the room like sunshine. Together, we began to paint, mixing colors and numbers, chaos and order, past and present, until it was impossible to tell where her art ended and mine began.

Sometimes, late at night, I still hear echoes of her laughter from those haunted days. But now it's joined by other sounds: the scratch of my own pencils, the swish of my own brushes, the rustle of papers filled with beautiful impossibilities.

It turns out you can't really be haunted by someone who's helped you find a missing piece of yourself. You can only be grateful for the ghost who showed you how to color outside the lines of your own life.

And sometimes, if you're very lucky, that ghost turns out to be exactly the sister you needed all along.