Most people love a good ghost story.
They love to snuggle up under a warm blanket in a cold movie theater and watch a scary film while munching popcorn.
They find it entertaining to read tragic stories so they can be reminded of their safe, warm, good life.
Most people think ghosts are these see through figures that come out at night but let me tell you that ghosts are more than that.
There are ghosts of the person you once were.
Ghosts of your past.
Ghosts of the future that was stolen from a person and rewritten.
Ghosts of places and things, ideas and laughter.
They aren't always scary or haunting. They are simply.......there.
There on another wavelength. Another timeline. Living and breathing side-by-side with the timeline you are currently on.
There....over there...you see?
A woman walking down the street drinking a coffee while she's writing a story in her head. She's always writing a story in her head. She enters the library to sit down and read books that help her to write her story in a way that makes people feel like they were there. She looks to her left and faintly sees a little flower shop with a woman inside happily putting together a bouquet. It's her on another timeline. On this same day just beyond the fog. The past ended and yet it continued. It ages alongside of her. It isn't frozen in time. She can see it everywhere she goes and she wonders? Do others have these ghosts or do they get to live one timeline at a time?
Most people love a good ghost story.
But what most people don't know or understand or simply cannot see?
There are ghost stories everywhere.
Living side-by-side people as they go about their day.
It's not a "what if?" That's not what this is.
It's a split in time.
A fissure in the story.
So much horror and pain happened and so? The story ..... it splits in two.
And the woman walking with her coffee? She sees both.
Every day.
Every odd dream.
Every road.
Every choice.
Around every corner.
And this woman with the coffee? She would be the first to admit that there are places and towns...people and avenues she can't visit too often because the ghosts are at every block, every street corner, every restaurant table. The ghosts of who she was and might have been, The ghosts of the people long dead and buried. The ghosts of her screams when no one ran to the flames.
We can and should put our past behind us if we need to survive and live forward.
And yet?
We shouldn't be afraid when we see the past in our daily waking lives or in our dreams or even nightmares. Give it a nod and keep walking. It sees us too. It knows all of this.....too.
Understand that if you see someone and they are looking off into the distance and are sometimes quiet? They might see a timeline you don't see. They might have ghosts that come to them in their dreams and they are sorting it out during the day. These people? They are the worlds prose artists, poets, and word collectors. They know what it's really like to feel.
The woman walking down the street drinking her coffee? The day her house burned to the ground while she stood on the front steps internally screaming, fists clenched, eyes brimming with tears, heart burning with rage and sorrow? Her past turned into confetti. It's nowhere and it's everywhere. It's completely gone as if it and that version of her never existed and it's alive in her children's laugher and the love she has in her heart for who she once was and has become. It touches every part of her life like a ghost but she's not afraid. She's lived this double timeline for going on a decade and she now understands that this is life. This is grief. This is trauma. This is loss. This is tragedy. This is her ghost story.
This is? LIFE.
Love always, Nik
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