Haunting

This diary is full of ghosts.

There are ghost-notes, notes with no name, left by the forgotten authors of vanished diaries.  RYN is a frustrating clue to a riddle whose solution is deleted data, erased years ago.  Who were they, what did they mean, did I know them before? The jumble of letters mean as much as the worn away names and dates on an old tombstone; significant once, to someone, perhaps, but whoever it was is long gone, and the cryptic inscription the only testament to their passing.

Ghost-friends linger in the corners of my mind, reduced to a half-remembered story, a fleeting emotion that’s remembered more than felt.  I remember that her name started with a lower-case d and that the background of her entries was a warm color.  The jumble of letters and a vague impression of yellow flicker at the edge if my mind, and I almost recall who she was.

Ghost-feelings roar out of these entries in words that I haven’t read in years.  Reading them now, I’m bewildered by rage at long-settled circumstances, pain over slights whose specifics I no longer recall, longing for a boy whose face I’ve forgotten, elation that no longer rises joyfully in my heart but settles in my throat as a solid ache.  I can remember the way it felt to write this even if don’t remember the day the entry described; almost, I feel it again.  Almost, I am possessed.

And ghosts wrote these words–five, ten, seventeen years ago–and though I am still alive, they are long dead.  There’s a girl who didn’t know how young she was, who still believed in her bright future; the woman who believed she had found the rest of her life, only for it to slip out of her hands and shatter into pieces; the living corpse who by turns wailed out a torrent of rage and grief and pain and despair, and quietly waited to cease being.  As I read the words that mark their passage through this diary, something stirs, and they could almost live again.

But not quite.