Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus

“Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses?”

Phantoms carry a theatrical and cinematic register here — spectral figures observed at a remove, like projections on a screen. The simile of wild horses adds an untameable quality to these ghostly presences; memory figured as something feral and uncontainable.

The speaker watches a former partner's new relationship from the outside and imagines the parallel life she might have had. The counterfactual is present tense and ongoing — she is watching someone else live the timeline she did not. 'Do you just not think about it?' is the haunting question at its centre.