Ghost

It was one of those nights. One of those nights at the end of one of those days. One of those days when you're just tired all of the time, alternating between hope and sorrow, questioning all those things you once took for granted. When keeping your eyelids open is almost impossible; when you pause halfway up a flight of stairs because continuing up seems pointless and you can't remember why you were walking upstairs in the first place.

Yes, it was one of those days. Forlorn sighs, watery eyes- despair.

I watched the sun --a blood red orb in an orange sky-- sink beneath the far off mountains. I cleaned and straightened everything out in the house. I even played my guitar: something I haven't done in months. After sitting on the deck in solitude, glass of water in hand, watching the iridescent shimmer of the yellow and orange lights of the city below, I decided it was time for a night drive.

Driving at night clears the mind. There's something about headlights and darkness, the barren emptiness of wide swathes of asphault, the single-minded focus of the driving, that's cleansing. I chose a nearby canyon and turned in.

The road was narrow, and near the bottom there were a lot of cars, but as I continued to climb the cars thinned out, and eventually I was the only one on the road- a lonely pair of headlights and a gurgling engine stabbing straight up at the full moon. Campfires and trailheads floated by in the blackened periphery of the road as I continued to ascend. I finally reached the top, and it was there that I saw it.

The ghost.

It was a disembodied light floating in the forest. It moved with an ethereal grace, drifting through the trees with an otherworldly motion. I quickly turned the wheel and hurried back down the road, not wanting to disturb it. It gave me a sense of foreboding, a deep spasm of that unnameable, primal fear of the unknown. I hurried down to a spot further down the road and parked the car.

I stepped out and glanced up. Far off, obscured by the trees, was the moon, and over my head the inky blackness of the night was punctuated with a swarm of stars. I never really see them anymore. I might catch a handful with an occasional glance into the night, but nothing like this. As I leaned against the car and craned my neck further the ghost reappeared.

This time the floating light was a little less threatening, and I restrained the urge to hide from its glance. As it wandered down the road it gazed from side to side, eventually turning its attention to me. It regarded me with passive curiosity, a sort of detached interest only ascribable to the truly foreign. It knew so much, this ghost, and it seemed tired, disinterested. I thought of waving to it, but kept my hands by my sides. It gazed at me for a while longer and then turned away, wandering further down the road until its light was swallowed by the darkness.

---

Postscript: I've been in a really awful mood for the past couple of weeks. This is the product of all that frustration, I think. Occasionally the Passion seizes me so incredibly hard that I just have to let it explode out of my hands before it burns itself up and disappears. I literally stopped on the side of the road in the middle of the night and wrote this out on my iPod Touch. I was crying by the time I got to the end.

I really want to add more to it (one particularly delicious phrase I thought of was, "One of those days when your mood swings back and forth like a corpse strung up at the gallows."), but I think that would dilute the aesthetic of it. I've made the barest possible changes, just changing a few words and fixing typos.

It's meant to be read slowly.