I stare at this blank page, as I would dissociate on paint drying. The letters blur into what feels exactly like the nonsense I spit up on the colorless white spaces I fill with the dark ink that stain my hands.

Today I feel empty. I feel faceless. I exist purely as a concept conceived in the mind of another, or perceived by eyes that are not my own. I am as tangible as a whisper or as concrete as a thought.

If someone would try to touch me, their hand would move right through, as if I am a digital projection mathematically calculated by computer code. Just a reflection sourced by primary colored LED's that undergo the current of a sea of delocalized ions running around a race track of electric circuits. An automaton incapable of performing the spectrum of human emotion that it was programmed to. Inoperative and malfunctioning.

Perhaps I am just a departed soul that lives in the slightest detachment to the scenes of my material life. The life that feels just beyond my reach, as if the tips of my fingers are grazing the solid surface of the plane of physical reality.

I am absorbed by the dark and vast vacuum in which emptiness does not exist. There is no concept of the expansion of three-dimensionally measured mass. There is no gravitational pull towards a direction that cannot be observed, because all units of measurement are negligible in the state of oblivion.

I wish to buy into the concept of existing as a hologram in a simulation created by some apathetic entity that wanted to walk around with a feather in its hat. Some rudimentary being fed by adulation in an extraterrestrial society of competitive intellectuals. So we exist as an experiment to be observed by a panel of judges within a competition of keen innovation.

Would that not change my perspective on the savagery of this existence? Living in a world governed by overly controlling primates that have experienced the pleasure of testosterone secretion when put in positions of power which allow them to exert authority. Neurochemically, that doesn't seem very evolved of us, but if it's just a result of a prompt designed by some advanced creature that plays with our universe, as one would play with puppets, it does not seem so animalistic after all.

I choose to refrain from further entertaining these thoughts of non-existence.

I would like to live as a leaf, that drinks the sunshine and exhales over the sweet seeking lips of life. How beautiful it can be to live in such magnificent and thoughtless simplicity, yet be more valuable than anything desire can fathom. A leaf that just flutters and sways into the embrace of the waltzing breeze, before it takes gentle flight, tumbling, spinning and meandering it's way to the surface of the earth. The leaf now peacefully rests as its edges curl and color fades, without an anxious demand to outlive inevitable expiration. It just humbly ceases its claim to space in this domain.

By now the paint has dried, but I have failed to notice. The color is identical to the previous shade and there was no sincere reason for it, other than creating an illusion of rehabilitation.

Being dead isn't nearly as boring as you might think.

I discovered this on my third day of non-existence, when I finally stopped trying to open doors and learned to simply pass through them instead. The trick, I found, is to forget you were ever solid to begin with. Forget the weight of bones and blood, the constant pull of gravity, the way air once caught in your lungs. Remember instead that you are now made of the same stuff as moonlight and memory.

My name was – is? – Thomas Webb, and I've been dead for approximately eight months, two weeks, and five days. Not that time means much anymore. When you're dead, moments can stretch like taffy or snap past like rubber bands. Sometimes I watch the sun rise and set so quickly it looks like someone's flicking a light switch. Other times, I spend what feels like hours watching a single dewdrop slide down a blade of grass.

I haunt (though I prefer the term "reside in") a small town in New England called Millbrook. Not because I'm bound here by unfinished business or ancient curses – at least, I don't think so. I simply never felt the pull to go elsewhere. Even when I was alive, I rarely left town. Why start traveling now?

Besides, there's more than enough to keep me occupied here. Take Mrs. Henderson at number forty-two, for instance. She's been stealing her neighbor's newspapers for three years, but only on Wednesdays, and only if it's raining. I spent two months following her around before I figured out why: she lines her parakeet's cage with newspaper, and she's convinced that newspaper stolen in the rain brings good luck to pets. I can't argue with her results – that parakeet is seventeen years old and still singing.

Then there's the teenage boy who sits in the park every Tuesday afternoon, writing poetry in a battered notebook. He thinks no one can see him behind the big oak tree, but I float by sometimes and read over his shoulder. His metaphors need work, but his heart's in the right place. Last week he wrote a sonnet comparing his crush's eyes to "pools of Mountain Dew," which was both terrible and oddly touching.

The living can be endlessly entertaining when they don't know they're being watched. It's not creepy if you're dead – it's anthropology.

But I'm not always a passive observer. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly solid, I can manage small interactions with the physical world. Nothing dramatic like moving furniture or writing messages in blood on the walls (though I'll admit I tried once, out of curiosity – turns out being dead doesn't automatically make you good at horror movie effects).

Instead, I specialize in tiny interventions: nudging dropped keys into view, generating the perfect cool breeze on a sweltering day, ensuring that the last cookie in the box is chocolate chip instead of oatmeal raisin. Small kindnesses, barely noticeable but precisely timed.

My finest work happens at The Dusty Tome, the bookstore where I used to work when I was alive. My former colleague, Sarah, still runs the place. She never knew that I harbored a decade-long crush on her, and now she never will. But I can still help her in my own way.

I've become quite good at guiding customers to exactly the book they need, even if they don't know they need it. A gentle cold spot near the self-help section, a subtle illumination of a particular spine, a barely perceptible whisper that draws their attention to just the right page. Last week, I helped a grieving widower find a cookbook that contained his late wife's secret cookie recipe. He cried right there in the aisle, clutching the book like a life preserver. Sarah gave him a free bookmark and a cup of tea.

The other ghosts (yes, there are others) think I'm too involved with the living. "You need to learn to let go," says Eleanor, who's been dead since 1847 and spends most of her time rearranging flowers in the cemetery. "The living have their world, and we have ours."

But I've never been good at letting go. Even when I was alive, I held onto things too long – old tickets stubs, expired coupons, unrequited feelings. Death hasn't changed that aspect of my personality. If anything, it's given me more time to cultivate my attachments.

Take my cat, for instance. Mr. Whiskers (I didn't name him – he came with that regrettable moniker from the shelter) is still alive and living with my sister. He can see me, as most animals can, but he's remarkably unfazed by my transparent state. Sometimes I lie on the floor next to him while he sleeps, pretending I can feel his warmth. He purrs anyway, the sound vibrating through whatever passes for my soul these days.

The hardest part about being dead isn't the lack of physical sensation or the inability to enjoy coffee (though I do miss that). It's watching the people you love cope with your absence. My sister still sets an extra place at Christmas dinner. My mother keeps "forgetting" to delete my number from her phone. My father pretends he's okay but visits my grave every Sunday with fresh flowers and updates about the Patriots' latest games, as if I might be keeping score in the afterlife.

I want to tell them I'm still here, that death isn't an ending but a change in perspective. I want to tell my sister that I saw her ace her dissertation defense, that I was there in the back of the room, cheering silently as she fielded every question with brilliant precision. I want to tell my mother that yes, I did get her messages, all of them, and that the cardinal that visits her bird feeder every morning is not me, but I appreciate the thought.

But the rules of death are strict about direct communication. The best I can do is send signs they probably don't recognize: a favorite song on the radio at just the right moment, a unexpected whiff of my cologne in an empty room, the feeling of being hugged when they're alone at night.

Sometimes I wonder if this is hell – not fire and brimstone, but the eternal frustration of being able to observe but never truly connect. Other times, usually when I'm watching Sarah shelve books or listening to my father's one-sided conversations at my grave, I think this might be heaven. The ability to witness life without the messy complications of living it, to love without the fear of loss, to exist in the spaces between moments.

I've developed hobbies, as one does when faced with eternal existence. I collect overheard conversations, storing them like precious gems in whatever serves as my memory now. I've become an expert in the secret lives of squirrels (far more dramatic than you'd expect). I've learned to read upside-down books over people's shoulders on park benches, and I've mastered the art of predicting rain by watching the way cats clean their whiskers.

But my favorite pastime is what I call "emotion painting." I've discovered that strong feelings leave traces in the air, visible only to the dead – streaks of color and light that linger like aurora borealis. Love is usually gold or deep rose, anger burns red with black edges, and sadness flows in shades of blue and silver. I spend hours watching these colors swirl and blend, especially in places where emotions run high: the hospital waiting room, the high school during prom, the small chapel where weddings and funerals alike are held.

Today, I'm following a new pattern of colors I've never seen before – a strange mixture of green and purple that sparkles like static electricity. It's emanating from a young woman sitting alone in The Dusty Tome, reading a worn copy of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." She has dark circles under her eyes and a hospital bracelet on her wrist. The colors around her pulse and swirl with an intensity that draws me closer.

As I hover near her table, I realize she's not actually reading. She's crying silently, tears falling onto the open pages. But there's something else – she keeps looking up, scanning the bookstore as if searching for something. Or someone.

Then she speaks, so softly even I almost miss it: "Thomas? Are you here?"

I freeze (metaphorically speaking – I'm always technically frozen now). It's Lisa Chen, a regular customer from my living days. We used to chat about books, particularly ghost stories. She once told me she could sense spirits, but I had dismissed it as whimsy. Now, as I watch the colors dance around her, I wonder if perhaps she was telling the truth.

"I know you're probably here somewhere," she continues, still speaking barely above a whisper. "Sarah told me you used to help people find the right books. I could use some help now."

I drift closer, fascinated by the way the green and purple lights seem to reach out toward me.

"I'm dying," she says matter-of-factly. "Cancer. Stage four. The doctors say I have maybe three months." She laughs softly. "I'm not afraid of being dead, exactly. I just want to know... is it lonely?"

For the first time since my death, I wish desperately that I could speak. I want to tell her about the beauty of emotion paintings, about the secret lives of cats and squirrels, about the way love looks like golden light and how sadness can be as beautiful as stained glass.

Instead, I do what I do best. I create a gentle breeze that ruffles through the nearby shelves until a small, leather-bound book falls onto her table. It's a collection of Mary Oliver poems, opened to "When Death Comes."

Lisa picks up the book with trembling hands and reads aloud: "When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn... when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut... I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?"

The colors around her shift, the purple fading as the green grows brighter, more peaceful. She smiles, touching the page gently.

"Thank you, Thomas," she whispers.

I stay with her until she leaves, watching the colors trail behind her like a comet's tail. Then I do something I've never done before – I follow her. Not to her home or to the hospital, but to all the places in town that still hold beauty: the park where the teenage poet writes his awful, wonderful verses, the bench where the widower sits feeding pigeons, the small garden behind the library where Sarah takes her lunch breaks.

At each stop, I paint the air with every beautiful thing I've seen since dying, every moment of joy and wonder and connection I've witnessed. I don't know if she can see the colors, but I paint them anyway – gold for love, silver for hope, and a new color I've never used before, one that looks like sunlight through leaves, that means "you are not alone."

Being dead isn't what I expected. It's not an ending or a beginning, but a different way of being. A way of loving the world without being able to hold it. A way of touching lives without leaving fingerprints. A way of existing in the spaces between heartbeats, in the pause between words, in the moment before tears become laughter.

And sometimes, if you're very lucky, it's a way of showing someone else that the cottage of darkness isn't dark at all. It's full of colors only the dead can see, but the living can feel.

I think I'll stay in Millbrook a while longer. After all, there are still books to be found, cats to be comforted, and stories to be witnessed. Besides, I've heard there's a new ghost in town – a teacher who's been rearranging the letters on the high school announcement board to spell out poetry at midnight. I should probably introduce myself.

Being dead, I've learned, is just another way of being alive.

People love hearing the way rhyme rolls off of the tip of my tongue, just before I sensually purse a lit cigarette between my red smeared lips. One more blissful inhalation, allowing the toxic tar to creep through my bronchial tubes and into the abused tissue of my lungs, filling it with the unclean oxygen that feeds my blood.

The world slows down as I'm embraced by the sweet satisfaction of enabled addiction. I exhale with closed eyes whilst subtly swaying to the rhythm of the acoustic melody that entrances everyone listening to me describe the bloody, red roses of Hell.

This is a poem about saturating the forest floor with the blood of my enemies. How they hang in somber anticipation of a ritual knife gliding across the soft skin of their necks and drenching the soil with the contents of their souls.

The blood gravitationally flows through the dark depths of the earth until it reaches the Underworld, where the Goddess collects it in a golden goblet and carries it to the table for the feast to begin.

The gods rejoice as I smear the bloody mud across my cheeks and decorate my walls with Norse runes to awaken my magick in preparation for the waning moon ritual I'll do to feed my power over the wicked creatures in my shadow.

"They will never regain control," I whisper, killing my cigarette.

Here I am

Folding my depression

Into a neat little packet

And tucking it away

For Monday morning

Don't forget to smile.

Morning sun. Fried eggs in the air. Screen door slam. Semiconsciousness.

Sturgill squinted, salivated, leaned over the rail, and blew chunks like a dog.

His niece hit the trailer door from inside. "Don't be barfin' on that walkway! I fuckin' walk there!"

Sturgill wiped the grits off his lips, immersed in reverie. What luck, finding his niece's ex's stash. Big ol' box of baseball cards. Sold 'em for $2000 at the sports card expo yesterday. Treated himself too. Horse, booze, God knows what were those pills. Still a thousand bucks left. Maybe he'd go see little Annie later. Been awhile since he... Heh. Yeah, he'd definitely pay Annie a visit.

Sturgill spit and looked up in gratitude. Life was good. The sun was warm. Breakfast hot. Sturgill slapped the back of his neck, then wiped a mosquito's bloody carcass off his hand. He shook his head, appreciating the ups and downs, yin and yang, all that shit. To think, fuck... wasn't even two days ago, he had a mind to kill himself.

11/12/2024

"Be fruitful and multiply!" Says uncle God, while diapers become more expensive than abortions and orphanages overflow with throwaway children born with their mother's heroin addiction.

"You get methadone for Christmas!" Santa says with a broad smile that protrudes ominously from under a thick, white mustache with yellow nicotine stains on it.

He stumbles into a hall full of parentless children, a torn up black bag in hand filled with donated canned foods and second-hand pajamas that the children from the neighborhoods have outgrown. O, come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant! Let us partake in sharing our old, faded and stretched out trash with the lesser children this year!

There is little that children are more grateful for than a hearty tin of baked beans in this day and age. Thank goodness the stay-at-home mom with the Mercedes and acrylic nails spotted the shopping cart for charity at the entrance of the grocery store. What on earth would we have done without her generosity?

Her application to heaven will surely be accepted by Saint Peter and his key to the pearly gates.

That is assuming, she hasn't fucked her personal trainer at the gym... Adultery is not tolerated by the kingdom of God. The book of Moses actually states that adulterers must be stoned and that always leads me to wonder if children were allowed to participate in stoning... What a world.

So many of us are just destined to be blasphemous insects writhing in the misery of our lonely existence, not nurturing parents patiently teaching their children how to tie their shoelaces.

Yet, here we have active addicts birthing brain damaged babies, victims of rape that aren't allowed to have abortions and abused mothers with Stockholm syndrome seeing her children be taken away and slowly melt into the system, never to return.

The conclusion to this does not include a solution to the problem. I'm simply just saying that people are nocturnal larva that squirms around brainlessly when you shine a light on it. So I'm lowering my expectations of the world. Not that I had much to start out with.

The fucking end.

I consider the irony in the thirty silver coins in exchange for the life of the Messiah.

Thirty coins to save yourself from an ongoing war that you unintentionally and involuntarily participate in.

Man, who is nothing more than an evolved primate, being forced to act against its instinct to survive, whilst natural selection shows no mercy to good deeds. One must adapt or die.

By the laws of nature, the elements favor those who do not oppose change, for it is inevitable and a constant within our movement through the illusion of time. What more is time, other than a measurement of decay and decline, as we go about believing we're moving forward, but in reality, we're actually counting down towards the end.

Death, where even the mighty has fallen and there they will lay, buried within the soil of the earth, right next to me. Rotting and melting off of the calcium and phosphorus rock that used to be the skeleton responsible for carrying around our consciousness.

I wish to hear what her majesty would say, knowing that she is nothing more than compost used for the continued existence of posterity. That for the duration of the sacred cosmos' existence, she was awake for less than a nanosecond and her reign will be long forgotten before the eye of the universe blinks again.

My insignificance amuses me as I observe humanity craving power, gathering gold and slaughtering animals to make shoes of their skin. Soon the lives we've taken will have their revenge, as we shall in turn, go back to the weeds.

I remember running with wolves and dancing with devils.

I remember succumbing to the creatures of the night and allowing them to set fire to my blood- it started leaking sorrowful lyrics from my nose. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I wiped it away as unblinking, bloodshot eyes looked back at me with accusatory condemnation. As if I'm the one that's doing this to her.

She looks like she's hardly surviving the abuse. She seems possessed by something which makes her believe she'll evaporate without it. Like she'll disappear into thin air and become nothingness, without the chemicals dripping down the back of her throat, burning it's way down her esophagus and combusting as it collides with hydrochloric acid.

She looks malnourished and starved. Her wide open, dark brown eyes are pleading for sleep as I take in the dark rings that serve as pillows for her eyelashes.

I have to help her.

She needs me to help her escape the glass cage she's being held captive in. I start hitting the mirror with my hands, she's trying to break it too, but it's not budging. I took a step back and swung my fist into the entrance of the prison, hit it as hard as I could until shards of red stained glass start raining over my body.

Where did she go? I broke the cage!

The bathroom door swung open and slammed into the wall next to what was left of the mirror's frame. Someone was trying to grab onto my hands as I was scratching streaks of blood all over the wall, frantically trying to find the entrance to the cage of the girl I just saw. I started screaming for help, but all they did was tie up my hands with towels as they lifted me off my feet and carried me away from the abducted girl that was being held prisoner.

I was put down onto a bed in a darkened room and covered in a rough and uncomfortable blanket. Someone was whispering that everything's okay, I just got a fright when I saw my reflection.

My reflection?

That couldn't be, the girl I saw was broken, tired and in need of help. She needed my help!

I looked down on my hands and saw the thin red slices leaking onto an old ruined towel. I noticed the bruises all over my arms and legs. My eyes were burning and I had lost the ability to be fully conscious, stuck in a state of slight dissociation. When did this happen? When did I get hurt? How many days have gone by since I've last eaten or slept?

Suddenly, a devilish shape appeared at the foot of the bed,

"My darling, you'll powder your nose with your last breath."

Stifled, burning embers extinguished, spark-less, lifeless and caged

We wither away, rotting, rotting like we too are being consumed

By more than what life has thrown, by a society igniting matches

Then shouting down that we burn too brightly, stomp him out, make her cease

Fire that cannot be controlled shall be removed, taken elsewhere

To burn through centuries of kindling in far away places

And the government, they hope the smoke never seeps home

That all that remains is dust, stomped down so deep we forget what it felt like

To briefly be burning, alight, consumed by more than cast away decay

But even specks sparkle in sunlight, if the wind wafts in just right

We may float, illuminated by the source of all heat

Remembering what we could be, before the boot crushed us beneath it.

Ashes to ashes, flame begets flame, suppressing fires only makes the burn

Uncontrolled, unceasing like how one may yearn

Simply to live untethered to social niceties, to clocks

That yield and rank us too much, always creating shocks

At how young a fire can be, how kindling doesn’t need a century’s suppression

As youth carries with it one’s first oppression, the boot’s first footprint.

I fear I'm destined for mediocrity.

That I am no more than just another fertile womb responsible for the insurance of the success of my species in the animal kingdom.

At least we're allowed to fuck irresponsibly without pumping ourselves full of hormones that change our holy temple's chemistry synthetically against what our biology intended.

What are the side-effects I have to suffer for jailing my femininity?

Me, an ill equipped catalyst to the existence of another chronically depressed masochist in search of meaning in a world devoid of substance.

I guess I invest a lot of time pondering a profound reason for my physical existence, that feeds myself spiritually by moving it in a direction that leads to the fatality of my ego.

So I do drugs. It aids me by accelerating the processes my mind has to be confronted with to reach that awakening I academically regard as a road towards reaching my full potential.

I'm not ignorant to the fact that I'm still just a mammal naturally existing to fall prey to the superior.

So humanity clings to religion, to mind-fuck us into believing we're individually, inherently special and uniquely engineered to form a part of the puzzle that embodies the image of the Holy Dictator that is solely entitled to judging and guiding our spirit to where we deserve to spend an eternal destiny, either in relentless pain or bliss.

I yearn for the dark abyss of non-existence. A thoughtless lack of concrete being. A short lived concept that only exist in the generation I shared less than a fraction of a breath with over geological time. I am just a brief thought in the evermore march of time towards our inevitable destruction of the Earth that feeds us.

So what the fuck is the actual point, unless I find a way to conjure up a way to convince my mind that something exists external to my rational understanding? I pray to the Mother. The underlying rhythm of the universe that led to my sentience against all odds. Does she whisper to me in my escape of consciousness? Or am I slowly turning into someone detached from logical reality?

The answer is maybe.