Memory of a Ghost

Author's Note: I wrote this back in 2018 when I was a senior in high school. The assignment was to write a belief statement, which is basically anything you believe in. Here is my belief statement.

It’s not the undead that I believe in, but I do believe in the death within life and the life within death. The sea, the sky, and the wind are constants – beings that have occupied the Earth since the beginning of time – so are memories. Possibilities of ceasing to exist have never resided with me, for ceasing to exist would mean to never leave a mark on the world, to have no memory, to never live at all. Everything fades into a grand nothing with time, but not every person does.

Buildings are burning with the voices of those before me. Their emotions flow through crowded rooms occupied by great voices and magnificent minds. Voices whisper across aged tables, and they mend into the voices of the past. Part of me wishes the voices could be set free, that they could venture to other libraries and other homes; and witness all of the characters that come and pass in life. But the voices never go anywhere, even when the owner of that voice is dead; it will always exist, left behind within dusty pages on dusty shelves. Some voices are known: Shakespeare, Poe, Fitzgerald, and Homer, but others are engulfed by the fog – for only their loved ones eye’s to view. I don’t think anyone can ever not be living. Sure, people live or at least they try to and then they pass, but the memory lingers behind. It rests within solid pages with broken spines, being read and analyzed until they are the memories of others, and that’s how the dead stay alive, living through the cloaks of invisibility.

While ghost words scamper on pages, ghost footprints run on landscapes. A complicated maze is formed through the dust, their tales unknown but existing all the same. Maybe he was headed to Florida, only to be caught by the winds. Maybe her destination was the moon, so she scaled the Eiffel Tower in Paris, only to reach down towards the Earth again, but this time it’s not her feet that hit the ground first. Her father weeps and her mother waits for her, but the only thing left is the footprints that fade from the landscape with the tormentors of time. No longer visible, her footprints are never discovered, but they are held by the hands of the dead soil that resides beneath the layers of the living soil. A memory unseen, but a memory all the same.

I was on television once. I’ve never been to Hollywood, and I’ve never strutted on the red carpet, but I’ve seen the flashes of a camera and I’ve seen the slideshows of paused memories. I miss the memories that run across my mind, but they’re gone, yet, they’ve never been more present. Videos aren’t just images blurred before a frame, but a collection of magnificent minds joined together in a single room, and a single memory. Videos that lay in dusty covers in dusty rooms with dusty recollections also lay within the mind of a deceased soul, who once held the memories of the authors, the celebrities, the family, and the memories of other memories which will cease to stop their scampers until there is nothing else to end.

What happens when we’re all gone? Does the world just dissipate until it’s nothing, or does it continue to live without people? Perhaps the memories sleep alone at night, or maybe they have insomnia. Maybe they transform into their own souls and they make their own footprints, and read their own books, and create their own tapes. Regardless, until there is nothing left, I will continue to believe in the ghosts of life, because the ghosts of life can’t die with the dead, they are spared for the memories of the living, and that is why I believe people are ghosts, trotting on an ocean of memories.