Let me tell you a story. The story of ghosts.

Not the ghosts that come into your dreams, turning them into nightmares, only to evaporate when your eyes open. Those are not ‘real’ ghosts.

Does that scare you?

Don’t worry. It’s not a scary story. I mean, spirits are scary, but only the ones that vanish as if they never were there, but still leave a mark of their presence. That is not what I’m going to talk about. That doesn’t happen in my story. No one’s vanishing here. I don’t like scary stories.

This is a story of demons.

Not the ‘inner’ demons you come across in every story, every essay, every poem ever written by an angry teenager. All such demons vanish at the sight of a pizza or chocolate. (Maybe, the younger demons love food.) Those demons can be easily scared or flattered.

Does this make you laugh? Well, my story won’t. Not because I don’t like laughter, but because I haven’t been able to laugh for I don’t know how long.

But, will it make you cry? Maybe not. I don’t want to make you cry.

Let’s talk about ghosts that exist, demons that linger, phantoms that actually haunt the roads. Roads that are not lonely but filled with other spirits, well-lit, not even close to anything scary, yet they end up scaring the ghosts themselves.

What? You think ghosts cannot be scared?

Well, for an instance, think not of ghosts. Can they not have feelings? Imagine waking up in a town full of dead people where you’re the only one alive, only until you realize that you’ve died before. Now, that’d be crazy.

But wait, maybe... maybe there are no ghosts. Maybe we are all demons. Maybe we’ve all died long ago, and these are our ghosts, impostors, living our lives? Maybe I’m a ghost.”

Rereading what he’d just written (probably for grammatical errors?), he put the pen on top of the paper, declaring the end of the writing session, and then vanished, as if he were a ghost.