The Fewer & Far Between

  by yr reporter yet roving in the land of the living  sh0n gRub  

       All my old dead friends of a long lost lifetime appear to have since slipped into a sort of gray subtext that I can’t quite place into words, but it seems as if they have been subsumed into the sparser population of fewer friends that I have left—these newer friends who didn’t even know my older friends that died. It’s almost as if my old pals' ghosts haunt this side by adhering, on a strange molecular level, to wherever it is my spirit touches.

   For example, my best friend Greg. I think of him after he passed on in 2018—soon to be nine years—and I feel that his spirit lingers here in my mind. It’s a common theme when we lose those close to us, friends and family, behind. But I feel there’s a new way of haunting, augmented by the digital world due to our interactions with people online. There are many on the World Wide Web that I have known for decades, including some I’ve never met in person, and I know they are real, even if our relationship occurs in an uncanny way. I feel somehow that those I’ve known who died have been subsumed into the fewer of us who’ve been left behind, here on this other side. 

   It leads me to wonder, for example, if my fondly remembered best friend hasn’t accreted somehow into some of my current friends—and what the difference is between that notion and my superimposing him onto others, almost as a self-fulfilling wish-prophecy—or if it’s just my strong desire that my dearest buddy hadn’t died and was still here to listen to me; for us to share our strange ideas the way we used to, always on the same wavelength, after having left me with the need to have someone else fill that role.

   It makes me wonder. To what extent exactly do those who have passed remain here with us? In what ways do the dead continue to linger here among us, the living?

   I can’t help but feel they don’t just haunt decrepit, empty buildings and abandoned homes the way all the familiar ghost stories showed us, so much as they fill our bodies—our blood vessels and plasma, the neurons in our brains—possessing our spirit, so to speak. Engendering a sort of displacement with the dead.