What is a ghost?
The sea at night is a treacherous thing. Seiji remembers this, but not who taught it. Perhaps it was something he grew up with, the same as washing his hands before he eats. He remembers now a sea like this one, iron grey and restless, running from one horizon to another. He cannot recall its name. Memory is a jagged, crumbling thing, like the craggy cliffs he now walks over, and it swallows more than it gives up.
He does not wish to leave this place. Seiji knows that. It feels more like home than anything else in Caido, and even if the breeze rolling in off the tide now chills him, even if the town is too full of noise, too saturated in itself, to hold him now, he cannot go. With slender arms he hugs himself, wrapping the too-big folds of his jacket more tightly to his ribs, and makes his way alone along the cliffs. He is thinking. Thinking: he remembers looking down at the water like this. A candle in the window, the creak of a door. Voices hushes beneath a cavernous roof, or shouting over the rocks…
He cannot recall their names. He lived with people, probably loved those people, and yet he knows nothing about them. How can he be so full now and so hollow all at once? He stoops to pick up a rock and casts it over the side, watching as it falls and falls and disappears, its splash lost to the voices of the tide.
He does not wish to leave this place. Seiji knows that. It feels more like home than anything else in Caido, and even if the breeze rolling in off the tide now chills him, even if the town is too full of noise, too saturated in itself, to hold him now, he cannot go. With slender arms he hugs himself, wrapping the too-big folds of his jacket more tightly to his ribs, and makes his way alone along the cliffs. He is thinking. Thinking: he remembers looking down at the water like this. A candle in the window, the creak of a door. Voices hushes beneath a cavernous roof, or shouting over the rocks…
He cannot recall their names. He lived with people, probably loved those people, and yet he knows nothing about them. How can he be so full now and so hollow all at once? He stoops to pick up a rock and casts it over the side, watching as it falls and falls and disappears, its splash lost to the voices of the tide.
Something dead that seems to be alive.
Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.
