If you do not believe in ghosts, it is probably because you have never met one. If you haven’t, you are truly lucky. Until my senior year of high school, I didn’t know the distinction between spirits and ghosts; I thought that they were a synonym for the same thing. The difference I have found is that ghosts never really died. Ghosts walk among us and we see them every day, though we cannot communicate with them and hardly recognize them. They are living in the world, but dead to those who knew them best.
I have known ghosts for many years now, and my thoughts toward them have always been mournful, like when you really do lose someone to death. The ghosts and spirits in the movies have always been a consistently frightening theme because it is a great unknown, or representing of some evil that we have little to no way of guarding ourselves against.
The ghosts I know have never scared me though; they make me angry, and they make me sad. And the worst part about them is that even after you stop seeing them, they really do haunt you.
The day one of my dearest friends died and become a ghost, I did not recognize it at first. It confused me until I realized that I would never really speak to him again, that I would never laugh with him again, and that I wouldn’t be able to be a fool around him anymore.
I was so insulted that someone I had spent nearly every weekend, and every party, with for two years could go like that without ever saying goodbye, without ever explaining to me that I was going to lose one of the best friends I’ll ever have. And for the first time in my life I had experienced rage, betrayal, loneliness, and depression seemingly all at once.
Pride kept me from reaching out to him at first. I thought, if he doesn’t want to know me anymore then I won’t dare let it show that I’m hurt. But I stayed hurt, and he kept walking by acting like he never knew me.
Like he was dead.
It didn’t take too long at all though to feel like I, myself, was also dead. That I too had become a ghost. My mind was trapped in purgatory relentlessly asking, "Why?"
Why did I lose my best friend? I could not think of a single thing I had done and found there were no signs of our decline, just that one day he had left my world.
The more people that come in and out of your life, the more you believe in ghosts, I think. Some people, no matter how strong a bond you have with them, will leave you at the drop of a hat, without a moment’s notice and leaving behind no explanation as to why they left.
The worst kind of ghosts, however, are the ones that insist on sticking around. The ones that are no longer the people you once loved and knew, but are now something morbid living within the body of that person you loved. They know you, but all you can do is remember who they once were.
This haunting is a terrible thing. For those who know the dead as I do and see them on a regular basis, you also know that it changes everything about you the moment they walk through that door.
Whatever contentment you might be experiencing has flown away and, by nature, you avert your very gaze toward them because it feels unnatural to see a person you used to know. In this case, I have found myself secretly wishing those people really were dead, and that I didn’t have to see them as ghosts all the time.
This feeling is always followed with shame, that I could wish such a thing on a loved one. And selfish, I suppose, that I should wish familiarity or death. I also suppose that this comes from a desperate dream-like longing for closure to an ongoing struggle of living in a world of ghosts.
Perhaps, however, it is not them that are ghosts, maybe people just change and that is the natural order of things. Perhaps it is I who am the ghost, whose inability to move onward has him locked in purgatory watching those who he once knew walk by, unable to call out to them.
I suppose that is why I can see them, why I remember them always, yet they never seem to see me. Lost in the past, preferring the structured and familiar confines of my own memories, I think now, that it is not them who are dead, I think that I am dead.
