I often stay up at night and look at the ceiling. Not for fun mind you, but the fact that every time around this time of the year I can’t help but wonder could things have turned out differently before my birth. Why does it happen? What purpose do I have this for? Am I touched by the hand of the Lord or cursed by the spirit of the Devil? I hate not knowing. I hate this. I hate it all. Suicide comes to mind sometimes then I look to my left. I can’t leave her alone. Who am I? I know who I am, but the what keeps me up… especially this time of the year.
It started when I was young. Very young. I’m often told I played alone as a child. I had no friends, at least none to speak of, until I was maybe 9 or 10. I’m told I spoke to myself all the time. They didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with me. I knew I was different. Old people were afraid of me. My own grandparents always did a façade when around me but I could see in their eyes a fear. My parents didn’t fear me; they were worried for me. I wasn’t creepy. I wasn’t mean. I was never sociable to anyone except the ones I saw. My friends where of the realm of magic and spirit. My friends were ghosts. My friends were only noticed by me. We were alone together.
I remember my first friend. He was often left alone, even by the teacher, just like me. It started when I decided to eat lunch with him once, or at least once was what I thought. He knew how I felt being alone. He knew the adults couldn’t understand us. ‘Kids can’t be sad! Kids can’t be depressed! Stop imitating what you see on TV!’, we heard them all. He had a secret like me. After school one day we were together behind an old portable building which had been stuck due to the elements crashing against them. He held out his hand with a leaf in it and closed his eyes: it began to burn. I wasn’t afraid of this. I told him my secret and didn’t believe me at first. Starting fires with your mind is one thing, but talking to ghosts is harder to prove. That was until I learned something new: I could tell ghosts to come into me.
Finding ghosts is never an easy task. One would think a graveyard is an ideal place to find them, yet only one or two out of maybe a thousand graves had ghosts. No… a graveyard is where the body rests for eternity, not the spirit. Sometimes they go to wherever it is spirits go after my help, but for the most part stay here in the realm of the living. The most ghosts I’ve found are in common places: streets, factories long been abandoned, old homes, sometimes at school. One day the ghost of a girl came into me. She would be as old as my mother had she not died. It felt weird to have a girl inside when you are only 10. She was killed by her father in a fit of rage and was never tried for it. She wasn’t alone… many ghosts stayed in our world because they had such anger and hatred for those that killed them. My friend believed I could talk to ghosts now. Apparently my voice changes, my face morphs a bit, and the color of my eyes changed when possessed. I have never seen me when possessed.
I decided that I would become a lawyer at a young age, yet found that it was harder than I had imagined. I figured that talking to ghosts wasn’t an important skill but it was a gift… or my curse. It was not until I met Miranda that I knew what to become. She worked at a pharmacy when she was alive. She found doctors to be overrated and being a surgeon too gruesome a profession yet wanted to help people get better. She decided medicine was the best route. Several times she broke the law in order to give people the medicine they needed at a price that wouldn’t hurt their wallets. Eventually she was found out and was poisoned with her own prescription for her thyroid. Police filed it as a suicide from drug overdose. I wanted to become a private investigator. I wanted to bring justice to those who escape the system or were able to escape because of it. Some might call this vigilantism. I call it a living.
One Halloween night I was analyzing evidence when my friend walked in. He looked pale and upset so I asked him to sit down. He had come to tell me good bye. I asked for what. He told me he just died and came to say good bye to me. I wanted to ask him so many questions but he held no regrets. He told me where he was and wanted me to tell his parents he loved them. I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t do this to me. You were the first friend I ever had.’ And then what he told me then has been with me in my mind. ‘Death won’t separate us. It can’t.’ Some things we can never forget. His last words to me are one of those things. That night was the first time since I was a boy that I cried. When I found him the next day, he had burned his apartment complex down. I tried to find the cause of why he’d do such a thing, but to no avail. It was on November 2nd that I told his parents. ‘¡Dios mío ...! ¡Mi hijo!’ his poor mother yelled in Spanish among other things. His father hugged her and thanked me for telling them. I didn’t want to inquire why this might’ve happened to their son. Losing their only child was bad enough. They didn’t need some guy asking questions.
I couldn’t find any trace of arson, any faulty wiring, no starting point. The entire complex, for the lack of better terms, caught fire all at once. So many people died, yet he had no regrets.
So here I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. Another Halloween passes me by. My wife sound asleep next to me within her dreams. I can neither thank God nor curse Satan. I can’t curse God nor thank Satan. I’m simply alone in my ability. I wonder if I am even Human sometimes, yet can’t come to an answer. Perhaps he killed himself for the very same reason I wonder if I should. If that’s the case, I should live long enough to find that answer.
I don’t fear death. I can’t. I fear its aftermath.
