#24 of 100: Unfinished Business
I am a ghost with unfinished business. Unfinished living. Freed from observation by others, I am now overwhelmed with curiosity at everything around me.
I’m pretty worn out as today was my first plane journey in years, thus this ended up being a fragment instead of a proper story.
My corpse smelled of crushed rose petals. It never did when I occupied it - it had never smelled of anything. My ex would bury her nose in my armpits and breathe deeply, then laugh at the absence of odour. She told me it was a sign I didn’t live enough. Two months after I met her, she went backpacking around Australia and our relationship withered. Her tales about sublime landscapes and fascinating, complicated people outmatched my stories about putting the wrong label on a parcel at the warehouse.
There was something wrong with my heart. I’m not quite sure what. When I shivered out of my mortal vessel, I hovered around it long enough to hear the doctors at the hospital suggest it was my heart, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch the post-mortem. I phased through the walls of the hospital instead, intrigued by this new way of being.
I am a ghost with unfinished business. Unfinished living. Freed from observation by others, I am now overwhelmed with curiosity at everything around me. I shimmer into the A&E waiting room and eavesdrop on a conversation a man is having with his girlfriend about seeded bread. He is covered in tattoos of dragons of all shapes and kinds, and now I can stare at the art as long as I like without fearing I might make him uncomfortable. My self-consciousness has been stripped, and now I want to ask him about every single tattoo. I try to seek some secret ghost energy within me so I can materialise or whisper in his ear, but nothing happens. TV has lied to me.
Further afield, I flutter into a nurse’s break room. A woman is sitting alone and keeping her head low, but I can see her eyes well up with tears. I peer over her shoulder to read the messages on her phone. I cannot scroll up, but as a flurry of messages goes back and forth with her husband, I work out that he has yet again used money in their joint account for gambling. He won big this time, so it doesn’t matter, he says. She’s making such a fuss over nothing. In some of the messages he sends a cactus emoji or a trumpet emoji, which must be part of a private language that I am not privy to. When he sends these, I see her expression soften. She is disarmed by his invocation of their entwined lives. I want to shake her and tell her she deserves better, but I am powerless.
I can still see and hear and smell and, I realise as I waft through a leftover cheese toastie, taste. I only lack touch. If I phase through a physical object it is similar to the change of pressure from going underwater, but I do not truly feel it, and the furniture does not quiver at my passing.
Everything is a one-way interaction. I make no impact on the world. Many people were oblivious to my existence before, but only now I realise I could have shouted or punched or whispered or caressed. I could have moved through the world as if I mattered.
I see no other ghosts. I would think a hospital might be full of them, but room after room I encounter no one who can see me. Who I can connect with. I do not know what I am doing here.