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Milanka Sulejic
Field Notes from a Haunted Girl
Entry #1 — Grocery Store, 8:43 p.m.
There’s something deeply emotional about grocery stores at night.
Not during the normal hours.
Not during the bright, efficient afternoon when everyone is buying spinach with purpose and pretending their lives are organized.
I mean late evening grocery stores.
The hour where fluorescent lighting becomes philosophical.
The carts squeak louder.
The strawberries look vaguely tragic.
Someone is always standing motionless in the freezer aisle reconsidering their entire existence next to frozen garlic bread.
That’s where I thrive, unfortunately.
Tonight I watched a man stare at yogurt for so long that I became genuinely concerned he was processing grief through dairy products.
A woman in a velvet tracksuit whispered “don’t start” to a toddler with the exhausted calmness of someone diffusing a hostage situation.
A teenage employee stocked oranges like he had emotionally left the building sometime around 6:15.
And over the speakers, some soft 80s love song played quietly enough to make everything feel accidentally cinematic.
I don’t know.
Places like this feel alive to me.
Not alive in the exciting sense.
Alive in the:
everyone here is secretly carrying something
kind of sense.
Sometimes I think grocery stores are one of the few places where humans still become visibly human in public.
Nobody is performing correctly near discounted soup.
Entry #2 — The Motel With the Flickering Vacancy Sign
I stayed in a roadside motel last autumn because the rain got too bad to drive through and also because I have the survival instincts of a girl in an indie film.
The sign outside flickered VACANCY in uneven red light like it wasn’t fully committed to existing.
Which honestly should’ve been my first clue.
The woman at the front desk wore silver rings on every finger and called me “angel” in a voice that sounded both comforting and vaguely prophetic.
My room smelled like:
rainwater
dust
old cigarettes
and somebody else’s perfume from three decades ago.
I loved it immediately.
There’s something wrong with me probably.
I sat on the bed eating vending machine peanut M&Ms while watching headlights slide across the curtains in soft gold streaks.
And for a second I had this overwhelming feeling that every lonely person in the world was awake at the exact same time.
Not connected exactly.
But adjacent.
Like stars.
The room itself felt emotionally observant.
Not haunted in the scary way.
More like:
the walls had witnessed enough human lives to develop empathy.
At 2:13 a.m., I wrote in my notebook:
Some places don’t want to scare you.
They just don’t want to be forgotten.
Which is maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever accidentally thought. Entry #3 — On Being “A Lot”
I’ve been told I’m intense in the same tone people warn each other about weather conditions.
Like:
“Just so you know, she notices things.”
Which is true.
I do.
I notice:
when someone’s smile changes halfway through a conversation
when a room’s energy shifts after one specific person leaves
when someone says “I’m fine” in a voice that clearly fought a battle in the parking lot beforehand
I notice tiny emotional fractures constantly.
Not because I’m trying to psychoanalyze people.
I just can’t seem to move through life at surface level.
Everything arrives to me layered.
Like reality has director’s commentary turned on all the time.
Honestly it’s exhausting.
Beautiful sometimes.
But exhausting.
People think being observant makes you wise and mysterious.
Mostly it just means I can sense a vibe shift before my coffee even arrives.
Entry #4 — Halloween People
You can learn almost everything about a person by what kind of Halloween costume they choose.
This is real psychology probably.
Some people want to become monsters for a night.
Some people want to become beautiful.
Some people want to become funny.
And some people — the most interesting people — choose costumes that reveal them more than they hide them.
Last Halloween I saw:
a vampire buying iced coffee
an exhausted angel smoking behind a bowling alley
a girl dressed as “divorced mermaid”
which honestly deserved an award
Meanwhile I was dressed as:
Soft Haunting (Non-Violent Edition).
Nobody understood what that meant except one girl in platform boots who looked at me very seriously and said:
“You look like the ghost of a memory someone almost healed from.”
And I’ve genuinely never recovered from that interaction.
Entry #5 — Final Observation Before Dawn
I think people misunderstand haunted girls.
They assume haunting means destruction.
Drama.
Chaos.
Damage.
But honestly?
Most of us are just carrying too many atmospheres at once.
Too many remembered feelings.
Too many unfinished versions of places.
Too many moments we absorbed completely instead of partially surviving.
We don’t haunt people on purpose.
We just leave emotional fingerprints on things.
A sentence.
A diner booth.
A parking lot conversation at 1:07 a.m.
A song someone can’t hear normally anymore because it became attached to a specific version of themselves.
That’s all haunting really is.
Memory with texture.
And maybe that’s why I’ve stopped being afraid of becoming one.
Some girls become wives.
Some girls become legends.
Some girls disappear entirely.
And some of us?
We become stories people accidentally carry forever.
Milanka Sulejic writes like she’s been left alone in a gas station at golden hour with too many thoughts and not enough supervision. She is the author of emotionally unstable weather systems, cherry-stained memories, and minor hauntings that insist on being poetic about it. Her work drifts somewhere between memoir, hallucination, and the deep belief that fluorescent lighting is personally judging you. She lives in the soft overlap between nostalgia and “wait… did that actually happen?” and writes everything down just in case it did. Website: here.
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