There's this a picture of the sky, with tree branches intersecting a cloudless abyss, it was taken exactly a year ago today, and I’d like to reflect on it. On the other side of that photo is me, a me I do not envy, a me that makes me feel distant from what I want to call myself. We have a tendency to draw lines in the timeline of our existence, to say that some attribute was the ‘old us’ and that what we use to think and do is so much more foolish than how we act these days. That we know better now. I want to feel that way with the me that took this picture, I want to write off his insecurities and deficiencies as manifestations of a problem long since past, but I cannot. Because to say you know better now is to mean the opposite. That ‘past you’ also felt that they knew better, that what they were doing, and thinking, and feeling, were pretty much the way it would stay for the rest of their lives, they were wrong, and so are you.

We don’t know better, in the same way they didn’t know better, the only way to gain an edge on that past self is to realize it hasn’t past, that it’s still here. There’s a reason we say memories and feelings haunt us, it’s because, like a ghost, they stay with us long after they should by all means be dead. The person who took that photo haunts me. He is still there, but not in the way the living are. You don’t see ghosts plain and true, you feel chills as they pass, and unease in the night. You feel the symptoms, but never the disease.

The person who took this photo has a very, very difficult year ahead of him, he is sitting on that bench because he had a panic attack that day, and he is looking up at the sky because it helps ease his fears about the subjective nature of reality, but not by a lot. His brain feels like a rubber band that has been stretched to the point where it is no longer taut. His face is pale, his eyes are shallow, and he is making the transition from a person to a walking corpse. He is dying on that bench. He is dying as he looks at the sky. He is dying in me now. He will always be dying, but he will never be dead. And, looking at this tree shatter the sky into pieces like a shattered mirror over the Atlantic, I’m okay with him haunting me, because ghosts only stick around if they need to tell you something before they pass on. And I’ll wait till that me is ready, I’ll wait until we both haunt a new me, and god knows I’ll wait for that guy to say he knows better.