When I was very little, I watched a lot of things on TV, just like everyone else. I forgot most of the details, the plots and characters often fading from memory.

But sometimes something stuck.

Like this one melody.

I remember trying to play it on a piano, thinking to myself “This isn’t from you.” I created chords for it and kept hearing it in my head.

Then one day this old made for TV movie came on.

And there it was. That melody.

It was the character of an Indian girl crying for her dead parents.

You are the first who will ever hear this - what I call my ghost melody.

My grandpa gave me his old typewriter when he was still alive.  My dad hated it and kept trying to throw it out with the trash.

And each and every night, I would sneak outside, fetch it and hide it some place new.

When I was a kid, I knew no fear or shame. I would dance in front of people on ferries and planes, put flowers in the hair of strangers; I would climb a rock face simply because I thought it needed climbing and talk and sing to myself because I liked the stories I could tell.

I am melancholy. Troubled.

It is quite simple.

I must stop loving phantoms.

It is not healthy to think so much on imaginary things when they cause nothing but longing and sadness. My brain cannot create a person or will them into existence, simply because I wish they were real.

It will try, of course, using that strange, sixth sense I have to find details, scouring each and everything I see for signs of your existence. Signs that I did not make you up, that there is a reason to continue thinking of you, the ghost, constantly.

It was better to have someone whom I was certain was dead, than the uncertainty of someone who might be alive.

pspo:

It’s hard to deny the appeal of a good porch.

St. Augustine, Florida

March, 2013

I would like to go to a town where the trees and shrubs are so willful that no one can keep them from reclaiming it, where the weather keeps chipping at the paint, old people never seem to die and people just got tired of trying to change things.

I want to sit there on a crumbling porch, amidst old things and smoke a pipe or something. And just be old and ancient like everything else.

If souls were created equally, bodies most certainly were not. I don’t think there is any denying that some of us can jump higher, lift more or think faster and further than others. Some of us are missing parts or features, others have parts that do not fit the standards of what these parts are supposed to look like. The world is also full of people that start off with a completely average package and end up losing function through accidents, illness or age.

In any case, when a soul lands in a body, it does not always have the neural pathways of another at its disposal, or the physical capacity of some to execute its will. If bodies are like receptors, it may even be that a soul is received by a fully broken station, where it is unable to function properly at all, on both a physical and mental level. In other cases, this soul is able to tap into mental channels that are alien to others, due to brain that is equipped with the proper pathways, or capable of physical feats that others can only imagine due to unusual gifts of strength and agility.

To some extent, this seems to be part of the trial we have on earth - to somehow come to terms with what we have as bodies. Perhaps your particular soul needs to learn that specific lesson your body is presenting it with.

Who knows. I cannot profess to understand anything beyond the limitations of what my physical brain permits my soul to do. Lol.

Otherwise I would gladly share the secrets of the universe with you.