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A Guide To Self Exorcism

"A haunting gone right?"

By Jake WennikPublished 7 years ago 5 min read
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Existing as a ghost is complicated, and here is why.

When you don’t really exist or have a reason to keep your form together, all your really want to do is sleep. You find yourself in bed more often than not, and if you are like me you have haphazardly tacked a solar curtain over your window to block out the daytime rays making sleeping much easier.

There isn’t really any reason to sleep all the time, and eventually, you just get tired of being tired. You get kind of stir crazy in a sense and you become a revenant of your own dwelling just sort of walking around and bumping into things but ultimately returning to your designated space to eventually fall asleep again.

It is all fine and dandy being a freshly departed spirit, just getting to spend that time away from work out of school, not having to adhere to everyone else’s busy schedule. Just being able to sit back and enjoy whatever it is that you want to. Binge watching your favorite series, eating whatever the hell you please, only taking showers on your terms, and just generally not having to worry about appearances or keeping yourself together. Your phone is quiet, there is no urgent matter that is pressing all of your buttons, and you are totally okay with living this good ghost lifestyle.

For now.

It could take days, months, hell. Maybe you will end up like me and not realize it until years pass, but this whole “living without a body” thing, gets kind of lame! I mean you would think that logically not having a physical body would make things so much easier, and in some ways it does! But only in those self-serving ways that keep us from doing the things that are expected of us. Without a body, it is easier to hide, easier to not feel, and generally easier to run away from everything that could potentially harm us!

But when the day comes that all of the books you own have been read, all of the shows you once enjoyed have been rewatched what seems like hundreds of times, and you rotate on the same carousel of websites on your devices every couple of minutes. You notice that even without you, time has this way of moving on, and when you don’t exist you do not get the option to move along with it. That is the curse of living a ghostly life. You are stuck. Bound to one location as you watch your friends grow up, graduate, get degrees, settle down and have families, travel the world, and live their lives, as well as do so many spectacular things that you only dream you could be a part of. But can’t.

When you have been a ghost of as long as I have you start to try everything, potions, pills, a lot of prayers, a little bit of magic, even just simply closing your eyes and forcing yourself out the door to exists if even for a brief second. But each time I just found myself getting thrown on my butt by what seems like a crushing force. Could reality be so cruel? Or does it just have something against ghosts in general?

The answer to both is, Yes.

However, for what ghosts like myself lack in strength, we make up for in resilience. Our, let’s say “condition,” allows us to bounce back incredibly quickly, even after feeling like our souls were torn to shreds. Unlike those with bodies like our monster friends, or the other seemingly grayish blobs dancing out in the corners of our vision, we are what we are. The essence of us is our body, we are transparent and intangible, yet at the same time incomprehensible to those of lesser intuition. Which can be as much a bane as it is a blessing.

A ghost behaves exactly how it feels, it is exactly what it is. I am just as much of myself as you are as much yourself. (That is if you happen to be a ghost too and not some other monster yet mentioned.) Things that are alive feel the need to wear things that give them sustenance and form, a shape that pleases the sense of aesthetics and an aura that disguises the ghost at their core, the weakness that is like the soft flesh of a peach ripe and juicy, easy to cut into. So the natural instinct is to of course develop a hard shell, become toxic, or attempt to camouflage oneself as something inedible in the first place. Everything that lives does this, you only start to realize it after you have spent a lot of time as a ghost and really gotten to know and understand what exactly it is you are.

This probably all sounds really drawn out and overcomplicated since I have the tendency to ramble, but the point of all of this is…

No matter what you are, or what your body is made of, you are what you are, and you feel what you feel. It might not always be right, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

So I am a ghost, existing without a body, tired of living, but also tired of this half-life in limbo. I exist in many places digitally, in the phones of my friends, and on the screens of you the reader. I am real. And I am going to prove to the world that I can exist outside of this home.

Because... Adventure is calling.

humanityfantasy
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About the Creator

Jake Wennik

An otherwise normal 20 year old trying to overcome years of agoraphobia.

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