Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

“Who says ghosts are confined to one particular place in time? What if ghosts are able to transcend? What if once you become a ghost, you have always been a ghost, and you can go anywhere, uninhibited by space and time?”

The game was to sit in silence and stare at the darkness ahead of us through the windshield. Convince yourself there was a ghost out there. Imagine the ghost standing just beyond your line of sight, melded with the shadows and the trees, a dark figure out there in the night. Visualize the specter in your head and force your eyes to see it. Force them. Then, very slowly, you counted out loud from ten down to one. If you were with someone in the car, you counted in synch with them. Like a chant. A prayer. And you let the tension build as you counted. The anticipation of what could be out there in the dark.

We will always be together because we have always been together. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.

I am everywhere at once, everywhere this other-me goes. Because we haunt ourselves.