ghosts

There is a ghost in your attic. Also, in your mirror. They are actually everywhere around you – and maybe you will find some under your skin, waiting to manifest.

There is the sort of desperation to existence that is perfectly preserved in art that you can find if you scroll far enough. If you think about it, the internet is inherently haunted. It is a wasteland of forgotten blogs, dead profiles and stories that sustain themselves because you never knew the author to begin with. The tacky colours and static sounds remind me of an abandoned arcade – a sort of radioactive haunt. It reeks of old dreams; the loneliness of the entire world encompassed in your phone screen and in an odd way, you are part of it.

And the thing is, I think we tend to confuse ghosts with demons too much.

Demons are a product of fear and hurt. Ghosts are of fear as well but of the more romantic kind, the sort you write poetry about. Who wishes to be forgotten? Do we not speak and write, etch our names into classroom desks so that we leave a mark? Do you not walk down the stairs thinking of every other time you have sprinted down them with laughter, tracing the handrail for a ghost of the memory?

In those very schools you are told for the first time that you need a purpose in life. And maybe there will be one, someday but what do we do when our lives run out? In the larger scale of existence, your dreams may not be forever and what will all your hard work accumulate to?

For some reason, is the first law of thermodynamics that consoles me. All energy in the universe is constant, it can neither be created nor be destroyed. You may as well die but your dreams linger in these very ghosts you leave. Every version of yourself in the past, even the ones you have killed to get to your current self – exists within your eyes while you gaze into the mirror.

And I think its beautiful that while the internet is flawed that we have grown around it so much that we share this experience with it. Like a grapevine spreading across the world, your loneliness is now shared with the whole world. And maybe this terrifies and yet –

Maybe it's the Pinterest boards I dedicate solely for 'eyeliner reference' and the fact that I haven't opened it in weeks. I simply do not have the time for it (the to-do list pops up before the intricate designs, telling me to go go go). There are bigger things to worry about now; but when I was 15 my whole world started and ended with the fact that my eyes were too hooded to draw eyeliner like everyone else did.

But it's probably the Spotify playlists.

The goddamned Spotify playlists. How do you listen to music you curated with someone else when they are no longer the constant presence in your life that they used to be? I play the first song (and the stubbornness of first love is still there); I play the first song and think of stupid fights and stupid jokes, paper towns and paper rings.

There's the occasional notification. A webtoon I used to follow religiously has been updated. I used to love this comic - it was my whole life and back then, being myself was the most daunting thing I had to do. (The notification is not an update; the author says she is going on a hiatus).

The notes app seems the most absurd. “Notes app poetry” has always been an enigma, and my own are no different. I have a plethora of notes ranging from childish angsty letters to lists of books I want to read and the most bizarre - 'catch up on magnetism'. 

(As in magnetism, class 12 physics.)

Maybe it's funny because I don't study science anymore, I never needed to. but it takes me back to a classroom, and a torrent of teenage regrets. Back when life was easier (despite the CBSE science-ness of it all) and I did not realize the rose-tinted lenses obscuring my vision.

The truth is that I have never liked to contemplate the nature of my existence, but I would like to believe that I am more than the haunt I will leave. Life as I have known it is about all that you leave behind, and I leave with me my ghosts because there is nothing more human than a lingering haunt – the sheer desperation of an echo, a remnant of existence, a shadow that desperately wails ‘I was alive I was alive I was alive. Please remember me.’

There may be a ghost in the attic. Treat her kindly.