First, you died.
Well, probably. How else would you still be here? You drift around the yellow caution tape, morbidly curious about how you died, yet still unwilling to know for sure. The splatters of blood scare you. You walk- no, float- down, and find your funeral, with your loved ones standing still in black above a plain closed coffin. You did not know you- they could afford it. Someone is weeping loudly, but you do not quite know who; everything is blurry and out of focus. You hear someone calling out for you, and you go to them.
You already know some of what being in this state entails; the death, your unchanging body (and you do not look at the site of the wound that killed you), the way you now live in greyscale, but what hurts most is the lack of touch. You cannot comfort them. When you try, your hand passes through like a cold wind they flinch away from, and it sinks in. You are dead. You died, and you do not remember what happened. You hope your last words are greater than you were in life, but you assume no one heard them. Still, you will be remembered, even if only for a while, and that is enough comfort for now.
You stay at your funeral, as your coffin is buried with soil piled atop and patted down, a gaping hole in an otherwise neat meadow. You hear your loved ones calling your name. Then, you start to see other ghosts as well; only a few, someone returning, all of them young, you think, and most with grievous wounds. Do they know how they died, how they were scarred? Were they scared? You want to ask them, but you do not dare. Some of them have such grisly wounds, and most of them look oh-so envious of you– of them, the living. You do not dare.
You want to do many things but do not dare, just the same in death as you were in life. You stay in old haunts, and it turns out that there are many ghosts there, some of them very unwelcoming. You leave. You follow your family, and it hurts every time they talk about you and replace the word ‘is’ with ‘was’. You cannot do anything to tell them. You cannot do anything to help them, but you stay there anyway. You probably could have survived somehow, this is your deserved penance, this is your just punishment. You stay with them and suffer from a million small cuts, a hundred wounds. You want to tell them that you are always there with them, that you are in their memories, in their hearts, something to return to, please just stop hurting and move on!
You love them the way you should have loved them in life. The living are always taking everything for granted, and you miss even the ability to feel pain, to taste something disgusting and spit it out. You miss hugs and listening to laughter you made even more, things they do not think twice about. Sometimes you scream and cry and hurl verbal barbs at just the right spot, in the hope of provoking a response, some response, any response, something! No one, not one, not a single person responds. You feel cold, even surrounded by people.
You cannot get warm, and often you return to the caution tape where you found yourself, your body long gone. You want to know how you died, but it is too late, and yet you go anyway. The blood is long cleaned, with just a small stain left as the only marking of your death. You do not know what happened. Perhaps there is a police report somewhere with your name emblazoned across the top. Maybe you had a quick death, maybe it was long and agonizing. Maybe that hole through your middle was caused by a dagger, maybe a metal pole, maybe someone’s hands. Your murderer’s hands. You do not know, but you would like to know, you would like to know why. You would like for it to have never happened. You would like many things, only some of them attainable.
Then, they move on, after a little while. The wound you left healed, and you want to scream. Listen to me, you cry. I’m here, don’t forget me, leave me a spot at the dinner table, call my name, remember me! You want to bring the pain back, do anything, as long as it seems that you are still remembered, that you still exist outside this lonely ghostly quarter-life. You understand the other ghosts’ envy a little more, and you return to the graveyard. You return to your grave.
You observe it as you did not the first time. The graveyard is full of light, as such places should not be, not with rickety metal gates and dead trees but with a neat driveway and a short stone wall surrounding the meadow. The grass is light green, your gravestone neat and untouched. It feels abandoned. The soil over your coffin is long grown over with grass, and you look at the other graves. No gaping wounds in the grass are visible, only a small gravestone, or even merely a sign. You are all left forgotten. You touch your gravestone, lingering on the markings that make up your name, all that is there to show you existed, all that is left but that trite saying: once someone is gone, their memory still lives. You do not care about your memory, you care about the fact that you existed and no one seems to think that important, no one but you. You slash right through your name.
You notice the gorges on the other gravestones, and you join the ghosts you once feared, their envy is your envy, their pain your pain, their anger yours too. You do not remember your name.