You can
sense it when you move out of a house, noticing just how empty a place can
feel. Like when you're walking through a school hallway in the
evening, or an unlit office on a weekend… fairgrounds out of season. It's
usually bustling with life, but now lies abandoned and quiet.
It's easy to
forget that most of your memories happened in places that are still around, the walls mostly
unchanged, with even some of the same people, who carry on in your
absence. But the world you once knew, and the people you still
remember, have long since moved on... replaced by so many others who
have passed through these doors.
You try to
stay long enough to catch up with the memories, to finally linger in the life
you spend so much time building up, hoping the world will stick
around to keep you company. But eventually you'll pack up your
things and walk through the place one last time.
And not a
day after you leave, it'll become someone else's new home: a blank canvas
they'll fill up with their own memories. Burying the life you built in a
fresh coat of paint, leaving nothing but echoes of what was once
here.
Leaving the
room not just empty, but hyper-empty. With a total population in the
negative, whose inhabitants are so conspicuously absent they glow
like faint twilight.
Maybe that's
why we want to believe in ghosts. Maybe it's just a fantasy. A
fantasy that our memories are so powerful they'll leave a mark on the wall that
would mean something to someone else, and can't just be painted over.
We just want
to mark our time here, to keep the rooms filled and the memories
alive. And if our existences are haunted, it'll be because
we're haunting them ourselves…
...because,
honestly, what kind of heart doesn't look back?
