101. Ghosts

After I died, a lot of things changed. As a ghost, time streamed together giving me the opportunity to watch the world in a way I never could before. The first thing I did was to head back to my old high-school and sit in the girls locker room. I watched the cheerleaders-those snooty bimbos that wouldn’t give me the time of day when I was alive. I watched and judged them as they changed in and out of their outfits. Every inch was exposed to me, I could almost feel them, but they were always just out of reach. So I sat there and watched. Every year a new batch of fresh young girls would come in and the older girls would leave. To me, they all blended together creating an endless supply of young supple bodies.

Then all at once, the locker room was empty. The girls stopped showing up. It wasn’t like during summer break. This was much longer, the paint faded and peeled before my eyes, like a time lapse video. The room deteriorated taking the memories of the girls with it. Eventually light broke though the walls and the whole locker room fell into a flowering field. I figured it was time to move on.

I wandered around for a while trying to find something I remembered. The city had changed so much since I had died. All the old back streets and short cuts that I used to take were now large 5 lane highways filled with never ending traffic. My old university had grown exponentially in my absence. Electric shuttle busses zoomed around taking students to-and-fro. Everything was a blur of motion and activity. When I walked into a lecture hall I expected people to notice. I knew they couldn’t actually see me, but for some reason I still expected them to notice. Back when I was alive, if you walked into a room, people would notice you, even if they were trying to ignore you, you could still feel that they could feel you. That they knew, somewhere, that I existed. Walking in and out these busy lectures, no one had noticed. No one knew that I existed, or that I had ever existed. In one of the larger lecture halls I found a nice spot above a projector screen to sit and watch. I could see the entire audience and they would look back at me. Even if they weren’t actually looking at me, noticing me, it was comforting to pretend they were.

Students herded in, found places, and then herded out again. This blur of action and stops gave me time to watch the fashions. The girls wore tiny shorts with skinny long legs. Dark colored shirts with long sleeves. Then they shifted into tight pants with tiny tank tops. Eventually they were back to long shirts and sweaters. Their patterns cycled and repeated. The clothing thinned out only to become covered again. The outrages of the corrupted youth seemed so ridiculous to me now. Nothing ever really changed, everyone was just another version of someone else. After their entire lives, after my entire life, everything amounted to little more than just another meme.

I needed to break out. I grew tired of always watching, watching the same thing over and over again. I figured there must be something to show, something for a life well lived. I decided to seek out my descendents, to find some sort of evidence that I once lived. This proved harder than I thought. Books were simply out of reach to me unless someone else had it opened, computers were the same. I could never do anything on my own, I was stuck watching other people. My predicament had never occurred to me before, originally I just wanted to watch, but now I found that I had no choice. I did nothing but sit by as my own life passed me by and now as a ghost I had to sit and watch everyone else’s life pass me by.

I stormed around the university library, running though walls and pushing on book cases. I tried to create cold spots, appear in photographs, anything to get attention, anything to get a second chance. A chance to conquer the fears that held me back in life, a chance to help others conquer theirs. Anything to just say to the world, “I existed.”

© Chris Richards