hi. i am dead. nice to meet you. most people would probably call me a ghost. i am, after all dead. but i don't really think of myself as one. you see, a year ago, i was very much alive. hitting the snooze button while waking up, running late for classes, opting for brunch to save money, goofing around with silly girlfriends. i was of a petite size, with a tan. my right eye was slightly narrower than my left, and i have had my share of zits and bad hair days. of course, now that i'm dead, it's really no use telling these, not that people can see me anyway.
i am like that of the wind. with no colour, no scent, and undoubtedly invisible to the naked eye. before i was dead, i always wondered what it feels like to be a ghost. now that i am one, i knew. it felt nothing. it's that void space you feel in your chest when you breathe, the silent cry in your heart when it's beating. the echoes of thoughts bouncing off in eerie darkness. total emptiness. like the chiming of a bell in an abandoned town. forgotten and isolated. like existence has never been a part of me. i was brushed off like a painting gone wrong. i am a blank canvas to the livings.
now and then, i would hang around them, the livings i mean. i would sometimes watch them performing their everyday routines while trying to grasp what little memories i have had of my past. but the people that i watch most often are the ones i knew when i was alive. when i wanted to, i can actually hear their thoughts - what terrifies my mum, why my neighbour woke up at exactly 0230 am for the past ten years, how my bestfriend fell in love with me but never found the courage to tell me so. i know everything i never knew before. they say that it can take a mere second to love someone but an eternity to forget them. looking at myself right now, i'm not quite sure what eternity means. not yet. all i know is if this is what eternity is, then i'd rather not know anyone. when you die, you get to see more stuffs than you can ever imagine even if you live to be a hundred years old. seeing is believing apparently. and if you only knew what i saw.
death loses all tracks of time. like those few seconds when you first wake up not knowing what day it was. only this one lasts more than a mere seconds. but being dead, i always take a look at the newspaper dates. its not like i have to buy them or anything. hey being dead has its bonuses. i would sometimes hold my mum's hand when she's knitting. or sit next to my dad when he's driving. yeah walking can be quite tiring. too bad a ghost can't drive a car. at night, i stood behind my bestfriend's chair while he's writing his diary. he hates blogging, said it removes all sorts of emotional values. beats me. he's a freak. a cute one who always complains about my unhealthy diet. i have only seen him cry once. at his twin's funeral last summer. even then he said it was the dust in his eyes. bloody testosterone. this would be the second time i witness those tears. the pages of his diary were soaked with them, each page with my names written all over them. i have stopped reading his diary since. or even going to his house and watch him sleep. can a ghost's heart ever get tired? mine did.
ghosts don't sleep by the way, in case you're wondering. but we do go back to our death scenes. and today is 'the day'. you see, on exactly the 23rd day of every month, we ghosts had to revisit the spot where our souls left our bodies. in my case, the roadside near the town border where i was hit-and-run by a car. none of us ghosts can fathom why we have to do this. i personally think that it was a way of 'them' to remind us of the last few moments when we were desperately clinging to our life, hope against hope that it wasn't our time yet. that the gruesome shadow was only passing us by, not welcoming us into its long clawing arms. yet when that moment came, that will be the times when you wish you'd stop smoking, that you'd listen to your mum and clean the bedroom, that you'd share your food with the beggar just now, that you'd pray at least five times a day. not enough. nothing is.
i was alive before. i was the epitome of life itself. embodied by laughter with all the scent and glitters of perfumes and hairspray. and today as i watched my bestfriend took away his own life with the help of a bottle of sleeping pills; it hits me that...
...living is better than dying. ironically, many knows that only after they're dead. and now he's walking towards me with that familiar dazed expression of his. oh how i missed that gentle coolness of his idiotic naivety. i stared at him and said,
"hey bloody moron, i love you too."
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