As a child, I was always captivated by the dust, shimmering in the sunlight in silver, circling in the air like stars orbiting. It was a universe the size of my palm that harbored all the truth and mysteries right before my eyes as a witness. I remember sitting among the children in lines on the wooden floor of the gymnasium, watching dust flying in the musty air of dull afternoon. I caught them on my palm and blew them like the dandelion seeds. Those afternoons felt like a piece of eternity. It is a memory of tranquility that is almost otherworldly. Death is to submerge into such a fleeting moment in the extent of forever. Even in the days of living, there was always a sense of mortality, a sense of the inexistence of time that sat in the back of my mind like a shadow. In the brilliance of the electric green of the grass, in the nipping cold that froze the horizon in blue, an unknown feeling drove my heart to the brink of sadness.
Now that I have become a ghost, the sorrow is bleached in white and drips in my hollow soul, lost in humanity. Without flesh, I am stranded in this bizarre world that has forgotten the operation of time. Like shadow and light into black and white, the time had solidified and materialized. It visits me like a daydream as I walk among the ghosts. The ghosts are always walking somewhere. We all are. However, nobody knows the destination. It is an unknown urge that drives us to wander endlessly, to stumble into blindness with each forward step.
I was walking across the golden field of rye. The sunset was sinking the blue of the sky into red. The bustling rye field made the sound like the turning pages. Another sound was like a rock moving its heavy weight. As I turned to the sound, I saw a colossal ghost, eclipsing the sun. It was steadily walking across the field, inch by inch, with its limbs in the shape of the harvester, reaping the rye. Its deformed purple body was rectangular except for its face, which was raised to the sky, drawing orange dusk upon the blue sky. The face was smiling in an unnatural manner, as if to be paralyzed, like its mind had turned into something of an object.
Over the fields, I entered a city where buildings harbor crooked shadows, and streets are tilted and coiled. On one side, the sun shone slantly, as the other side was dipped in the darkness of the night. Like a puddle reflecting, it breathed of gleaming stars as pieces of sky gaped beneath the ground. A strange glow wrapped around the corners of the streets where the restaurants let out the smoke. Ghosts in the streets were mimicking the smoke, turning themselves into the shape of haze, stretching their hands to touch the firmament. Carts were moving along the road in a rush that carried ghosts the size of a doll. One ghost was sitting with slouched shoulders and with wide and circled eyes as if in shock. It was the color of a cold, blue dawn.
I wandered through every street and building. The ghosts seemed to have lost themselves and become something completely unrecognizable. I was the only one who vaguely had a mind to understand my own existence. I sought tranquility, a consolation, away from the crowded city, away from obscurity. A sound of laughter caught my feet. The faint sound of the incongruous harmony of notes was fluttering in the air like butterflies. It was coming from a school where children were playing in the playground, picking clovers from the flower bed to make them into rings and weave them into wreaths. Behind them, in the classroom, the wind blew through the open windows, carrying the sound of laughter and notes of music to be scattered across the dirt floor of the playground. Like a shattered sunbeam upon the glass, they shimmered upon us as I stood like a tree among the children and watched them play.
Then, a sudden impulse pulled me inside the school, into the corridors, past the classrooms filled with afternoon sun, and past the stairs with faded tiles under the glass windows. I floated like a listless tune and landed in the shadowed corner of the dusty gymnasium. As I sat there, time started to fly. My mind was haunted by the shadows. I felt myself erode and decompose into it as madness gnawed at my last string of consciousness. I screamed in silence as I became the darkness itself. Time robbed me of my existence, and all my memories and all my senses were drained down the void. Tantalizing terror swallowed and digested me slowly, and complete darkness seemed to blind me. Sound died away as the light started to extinguish. Sealed with silence, I thought to myself that this was the end. Instead, time halted on one afternoon.
From the shadowed corner of the dusty gymnasium, I saw myself sitting in line among children on the wooden floor. She was watching dust flying in the sun. She put her hand in the air, waiting for dust to fall into her palm, and blew it like the dandelion seeds. Silver dust scattered in the air as time shattered into moments. I became something she could no longer comprehend. I became one of the ghosts, melted in shadow, and the memory of her existence in mine washed away and drifted apart into the vast darkness. As she stared into the corners of the shadow, her eyes touched mine.
It was a cycle of memory and remembrance. I was living through her memories, and she was daydreaming mine. In the revolution of the flying dust, in every second captured in memory, in the silence of the trees, and in laughter soaring into the blue autumn sky only to descend, the unknown sadness that lingered in my memories mourned over the void of my existence, of how fleeting and yet eternal it was.
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