a fun thing with writing stories is that while i’m writing them i just go with a dumb title like ‘ghost condo,’ or ‘scuba skeleton thing’, something i can look at and instantly know yeah that’s that story ok.
and then i finish and have to come up with an actual title, and the story i’ve been thinking of as ‘ghost condo’ is suddenly ‘We Who Inhabit These Walls’ or crap like that. and anyone reading it wouldn’t know, but for me those stories are forever marked ‘scuba skeleton thing’
It’s unsettling how much I empathize with the characterization in this story. We (meaning me as I read this) see this ghost of sorts as a personification of our emotions,or lack thereof. A silent spector called depression wandering through life, never seeing, never hearing, but always there. And the more we see it in our lives, the longer we spend in it’s company, the more it tends to affect us. We begin to…adopt it’s mannerisms,haunting the walls of a home while still going through the basic necessities and motions of life. We become it,embrace it’s company like an old friend. A cherished loved on who once swore to never leave, that they would always be there. And in truth it always remains to haunt our halls.
We cannot escape the cold grip that is it’s truths, because to do so or to try to is to deny ourselves the truth of the essence of our naked selves. To deny the one thing that makes us human. It is our ability to know of, to be able to process the reality of, the inevitable day that is the day of our death. For we are the only creatures on the face of this wretched planet that know of death. Who fear that death. That can prepare for that death and yet still question what is beyond that moment when our lives expire and our bodies begin to rot and decay the way nature intended.
And yet…still…despite our knowledge of these things…we still allow that ghost into our lives. We begin to haunt our halls the same way that ghost wanders the halls of our conscious minds. But when we chose to turn to this cold…dead creature for comfort? This thing that should in all sense of the word know us as intimately as we know it’s every move and effect and action…will it comfort us? Will it finally acknowledge our prescience? Because we came to terms with it’s existence already. Obviously we have if we’re turning to it for comfort.
But really? Will it comfort us? Will it care? Or will we have to deal with the harsh truth that it is not an entity that we should have emulated our lives from, some…gaud that thought to care about us, but instead was just…plain and simply…a ghost. A cold dead shell of a being. And proof that maybe…just maybe..there is nothing after. That those who linger behind have not yet come to terms with the nothing.
And so it lingers…not to cause us grief…not to force us to accept it. No. It lingers because it has not accepted the nothing…and so in turn the nothing has not accepted it.
Is this really what we want? To emulate and embody something that even the nothing has rejected?
(Jeeze…I should really get some sleep omg)
i fucking love in-depth reader analysis, thank you you funky little nerd
Just zoned out for about 10 minutes thinking about this
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 