This article is reserved for subscribers. They are no longer in our lives, yet they are everywhere. How can we explain that the absent ones—the dead, the ex-partners—continue to haunt us? And how can we live with the omnipresent absence? The essayist Valentin Husson explores this painful question in an exclusive text. We wake up in the morning thinking of a past love, a ruined friendship, we cry for our dead with all the tears of our body, we go to flower their graves in these gigantic haunted places that cemeteries are, we get scared in front of horror movies, we feel in our body each of the phantom limbs that have been amputated from us: the loved ones, the friends, the parents. The ghosts precede us: they are our memory, our unconscious. The spirits that weigh on us, we continue to call them without meaning to, in order to better banish them. They have, in any case, no need to be asked; they are there, everywhere, at every moment, all the more present as they are absent. We hear them faintly. If we do not see them, or not always, if we think we see them without being sure, it remains that we recognize them. One single person is missing... and they repopulate everything. It is because they continue to impose themselves, even when we think we have exorcised them, that they are called the returnees. The returnee is the way in which the ghost burdens us invisibly. They are our demons, our daimons, who speak to us and teach us. They are poltergeists, these knocking spirits that resonate all around us. There is nothing paranormal. The ghost is what is most normal in a life. We are never haunted by only one ghost. There are necessarily several. In every corner of our house, in the wardrobes filled with the last forgotten clothes of the loved one, in photo albums, in the little notes we have kept, in the gifts we have not managed to throw away, in these cities where we passed within two; and sometimes even more tragically, in the voice, the eyes, the hands, of the one who later shares our life, and in whom we still hear, see, and feel their timbre, their gaze, the warmth and softness of their skin. This attachment that applies to the dead also applies to the absent. Have you never mistaken a passerby for someone else? You walk and wander through the streets, and all of a sudden, someone jumps out at you, it is him, it is her, you are certain, you have recognized them; it has been a long time; you approach, and from afar to near, you realize that it is not them. In their eyes, their hair, their neck, yet you had seen them. You were haunted, that is how it is. You saw nothing else but the features of a face that still circles your heart. In Love Crazy (1937), André Breton expresses it in a way that is just as sublime as tragic: "Among all these faces of women, one face: the last loved face."