Living is like walking, possessed, through an old house that's veiled in spider webs. I am shrouded by ghosts that drive my body through rote actions that at one time were not my own.
It's only natural to hunch my back, sip at a beer while on the porch, and slowly smoke. I am not myself when I do this but I am more myself then than any other time. Because I am my father; thin lips wrapped around the mouth of a bitter ale and existential dilemas over his lack of ability to communicate. These are not my thoughts but his. He is long dead but still here in the most subtle and invasive ways possible. He mumbles his thoughts on intelligence and they come out my mouth. He throws the kitchen towel over his shoulder while he cooks and my arm goes to follow him. He speaks quietly, with a most effective venom when angered, and my mouth hisses out sibilant word after sharp vitriolic invective. Even with this, it is not him that has taken the strongest hold on my mindlessness.
Chris. I've heard her cadence in my voice and felt those nervous jitters she used to get in my leg. Every smile I make is hers and every cock of my hip sends pains of remembrance down the spines of my family. Not even one of my oldest favorite authors is my own.
It is hers.
Everything that makes me a unique individual is a simulation of someone else. I wear a well-stitched skin of other people, making me the very best Frankenstein's Monster there has ever been. I have her smile and chin and his nose and hairline and her fashion and his sense of humor and hopefully, hopefully, one day I'll have her air of solemn love that blanketed her like Atlas' onus.
I am not alone in this.
We are all quilts made up of other people and their memory. Whether they be alive or no, they will haunt us until our very last breath and after it. Every smile, every laugh, every sad time, every pain, every ounce of suffering that we have builds our control over others.
We haunt the living as much as the living and dead haunt us. Other people's experiences that we have helped them build will take to their minds and stick like flimsy spider webs; they will cling to them and cause them to mindlessly jerk their body in motions that are ours and not their own.
Except they are now.
One day someone will smile and it will be my smile. One day someone will throw a kitchen towel over their shoulder or sing while they wash the dishes and it will not be them but me.
I will be a guiding light in someone's life with or without my continued presence.
And that is both the most daunting and freeing thought there is.
I will live on even if my body does not.
I will perish and rot into so much meat and all of these shining habits that I've gratuitously stolen from those around me like a rabid magpie will live on in those who survive me.
I am haunted as I haunt others.
The same is true for you.
