Living with Ghosts

If you live long enough, you can't help it. The choices you make, the things you do or don't do, say or don't say, inhabit you, define you, consume you. Memories, ghosts of the past, silent witnesses that shadow your thoughts, stalk your dreams, remind you of just what you are and are not. Like the ancient Furies, they are inescapable, and just as unrelenting in their judgments. You can hide your true self from your family, from your friends, but they are beyond the parlour tricks of self-deceit. You can not lie to the ghosts, only to yourself.

They are as intimately familiar as your own skin, these watchers from the shadows of your soul, relics of the blood and wreckage you've left in your wake. They gather in the small hours of the morning, when you can't run, can't hide from the things you've done, speaking to you with no words, just a silent scream that echoes through the chambers of your mind. Unbidden and unwanted, they remind you that "No fair!" doesn't count, that "Why me?" is the saddest question in the world.

I woke up once and knew that my living room was full of dead men, that I would have to go out there, cover them up, collect their tags. So I sat in bed, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the dream to pass as the ghosts gathered, filed by one by one. But the dream never does pass, no light ever comes to dispell the gloom as the spectres flit from shadow to shadow. The dead and the forgotten demand their due.

Grasping at air, wrestling with smoke, running from ethereal will'o'wisps you can't escape. Every day, every choice only adds more ghosts, lost possibilities, regrets that you struggle blindly to forget. Yet the more you fight, the deeper into the web you find yourself enmeshed, until you can't remember what it was like before the ghosts came.