All Love Stories Are Actually Ghost Stories

I don't believe in ghosts, at least not what others might think of as ghosts. The only time I ever believed in ghosts was when I was little, I would have this dream where a little girl would be standing in our living room pounding on our front door. She would be dressed in these old, little house on the prairie-esque pajamas and would be screaming and pounding on our front door. My whole family would walk out and see her, my step dad, being the brave one, would step over to the girl and gently open the door. We wouldn't see her run out, but we would hear her little feet crunch quickly in the snow through the darkness that in dreams seems incredibly more opaque than real darkness. Keep in mind this is a dream and it happened often. No one else in my family had the same dream and eventually I just stopped having the dream altogether, though I never forgot it. When I grew older I realized that I don't believe in ghosts, but the power of unconscious imagination. We are so unaware at our own subconsciousness' ability to pierce our view of reality that we believe that it can only be ghosts, or some other inexpiable thing. I understand many people might disagree because they believe in ghosts and nothing can shake them of that, I can respect that and I do respect that. I just don't believe in those kinds of ghosts, what I do believe in though, is not too far off the mark of what a ghost is to some people. Let me explain:

I believe in the past manifesting itself into a physical presence that haunts you. This could be via dreams, or dejavu, or what we interpret as ghosts, or the last few unfiltered thoughts we have before we fall asleep. These are the most frequent for me. These instances, when you're faced with fairly large periods of time with no access to distraction. This could be when you're in the shower, before you fall asleep, just zoning out, et al. In the response to potential boredom the inner most parts of your mind will often project these memories in a mad dash effort to distract you. Often these memories have to be traumatic enough to catch your attention, but not so traumatic that it's uncovering things that have been buried in your mind forever. For example, moments before I fall asleep or into prolonged awake unconsciousness, instead of getting memories of the few and far between near death experiences I've had in life, I get ex girlfriends. Floods of memories of ex girlfriends. Generally, if I'm not sleeping or about to sleep I snap myself out of it, but it's usually too late; the damage, the haunting, has already been done.

Each of the three of my former relationships ended in something terrible I did, as well as several terrible things that I did in the course of them. When I'm bored and rely totally on my subconscious to kick in the way I trained it to, it usually gives me cut scenes of me cheating on them, saying something terrible and callous, lying through my teeth, all in an effort to leave one and get with another. All the times I said I love you dashed against the ground as I crash and burn the relationship in a maddening attempt to get out of it without being honest with myself. This is coupled with the total reality of these people in my day to day life. I may see them across the room at parties, catch glimpses of them on social media or via mutual friends. In the sense that I completely avoid contact with them (and they with me) it is like these three women are ghosts; they haunt my subconscious and appear in subtle uncommunicative ways in my day to day life. They are constant reminders of  my deepest human failures and they are completely unavoidable. I know this because two of them don't even live in the same state as me and yet they seem so much closer, if not in tangible proximity, then in a realm that would put any seance to shame.

In many traditional ghost stories, the reason for the lingering spirit is that it has some unfinished business that is keeping it from transcending to wherever the hell ghosts go. This could mean they need to pass on some warning, or expose who really stole the family jewels, or restore honor to themselves or others, or be a better parent or whatever. Yet it seems my experience with ghosts are the ones that Scrooge encounters in a Christmas Carol. These ghosts do not have any duty to themselves, but rather a duty to expose other's flaws in some existential way and these ghosts don't go away, but are instead sentinels, keeping tabs on whether you're living the life you promised that you would as you got on your knees and sobbed and begged a second chance for. In this way, those that are haunting me are saving me from this selfish condition I've been living in, showing me that I was not born doomed to this miserable and insatiable selfishness, but that I have a means of choosing to live a different and responsible way. In other words every time I accidentally see or think about one of my ex girlfriends, it is their way, my own mind's way, of showing me my grave; cold, dark and alone, then pointing me down the right path.

And of course they don't know this or do this willingly, I'm fairly certain they all hate me and would not like to think of themselves helping me in anyway. I have nothing, but immense respect for my ex girlfriends, they are all amazing people and not one of them deserved to be treated the way I treated them. On that note, Scrooge's life was made all the better on the backs of the people he screwed over. This is something I can choose to dwell on or, as I prefer, cower in fear of.
Whew.

Thanks for Listening,
Kyle