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Frozen Ghosts 2/5/2006 7:43:39 AM
Sometimes the very things that haunt us, are our own memories. Nothing as horrendous and monstrous glamorized beneath Hollywood lights...but our most intimate and personal beliefs, faded dreams and lost loves.
From this, ghosts are born and dance at the periphery of our vision. If anything...the sole purpose is to taunt us that life goes on. Life is infinite, we are not.
I guess that I'm only thinking like this because I remember when I first held onto this revelation and that memory is flowing back into my awareness. I'm remembering a friend of mine when I was very young - in elementary school. We lived close and we always played outdoors and rode our bikes. He had two slightly older brothers who delighted in terrifying me with tales of creatures in the woods that surrounded their house to the point that their mother would make one of them venture into the dark and ride their bike along with me as I rode up the hill to my house. We were all such good friends and that's how I remember true friendship filled with innosence before we were corrupted by cliques, influences, popularity and all the other things that arrive like a plague as we grow older.
Just a day shy before the start of our 8th grade year (and this is the point that we had already gone our seperate paths from frienship...some were "cool" and some were not...I being the latter), my old friend perished. A calm and shallow river claimed him while he fished with his familiy. He had stumbled into a deep hole that the river bed had hidden. From this darkness, he'd never see light.
I went to his showing after school let out for the day. I felt the thickest grief imaginable when I turned to see him lying there. The last time that I had seen him, was in one of our 7th grade classes that we had shared together just a couple of months prior to this solemn gathering.
I looked at the pictures that were posted up on a bulletin board detailing his brief 13 years of life. Not fair. What life?
I saw pictures from the time that he and his family lived near my house and I remembered all of our games and adventures. Why do we let things fade us away little by little?
A couple of months after he was returned to the earth that had nourished him, I realized how infinite life was. The very cracks in the road that I was walking over at that moment, were the same cracks that he had rode his bike over. The leaves that were on the trees, were the same leaves that waved farewell to he and his family that final day in the summer light.
Life continues on as though programmed - devoid of all emotion or sympathy when a life falls to the side of the metaphorical road. Every day, people are lost to the churning tides of time and there are those who will never be touched by the grief to mourn a stranger. We are indifferent unless it effects us on a personal level.
How many times have you glanced through an obituary to look at the names and faces only to move on to the comics when there was no familiarity listed?
My friend has been gone now for 14 years. That is one more year than he was allowed to live. I remember him from time to time as an acknowledgement that he had lived. Even if in the last couple of years of his life that he had become friends with those who made fun of me, he existed. I wonder if his other childhood friends still remember him in detail or remember him at all. I know that his family will remember him - he was a part of them now missing. But I fear that our lives become lost as a family pet would be in memory. At first, heavily grieved and then as time progresses, that pain subsides into memories and as more time goes, that memory is lost.
The memory of my grandfather is nearly gone. People whom I've lost close to me have become forgotten ghosts. They only haunt when I remember that they once were.
We create our own ghosts and at times, perhaps they create themselves to remind us of that very revelation...life is infinite. We are not.
If there be a Heaven or a Hell, I'm sure that life continues somehow in its own infinite way...some great design or awareness of the soul. I don't know. I rest none of that in the craddling arms of any religion.
No one is special to Time...it will not cease its whirring rotation to mourn. It just IS
