Hey Mortality

by Kinsella, Luke

  The world here is so very strange. Statues of ghosts have no name. The only thing left is closure, to follow the path I have been guided towards, to find out the answers or some meaning of sorts. But ghosts won’t help me find an ending, or a new beginning. Ghosts are ghosts, and the dead still remain dead.

  19

  When life has taken everything away, we are faced with difficult choices. Some people, they cut their wrists, others hold a fake smile for a day and tell everyone that everything is okay. I just fall alone, and wait as one thousand ghosts haunt my state of mind. And I realise that there is nowhere else. That there is no one else.

  It saddens me to realise that now, even though those times with her were some of the best times of my life, they feel like a distant daydream. Like a shattered existence that no longer feels like it was real, like something great that has faded away and remains somewhere in the deep depths of my mind. Just a traced outline of a time gone by.

  I want nothing now but for someone to take me away from here, take me home, or to take me out of this horror. So, instead, I will just leave and start again, all over again. Screw everything else, every thought or dream into a little ball. A paper shape of words and hate. The inky remains of a hand written history that is all but ready to be forgotten. Ready to be left alone like the darkness and misery. My time to travel, to leave and to travel to a place where even the Devil will not follow me.

  With my bag of everything left, I wander to Minowa Station and take the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line; my escape route. At Ueno Station, I take an unreserved seat on the Shinkansen, a high speed bullet train that will waste no time in taking me away from the slums, forever.

  After just under five hours, I arrive at Kokura, a place I have heard of only in the manuscript. The train stops here though, so I walk around a little and end up at the castle. Even though the castle is beautiful, I am too distracted to concentrate.

  I think long and hard about how I came to this point in my life, and finally accept that with her gone, that it was all my fault. Liar was good to me, but my own paranoia and questioning of her whereabouts, who she was with, what she was doing; those things kept her trapped in a cage. A cage I built around her rather unfairly. She did nothing wrong but return my love for as long as she could allow. But fighting about things as to where she slept that night, or asking her bluntly if she had ever cheated on me, or if she really loved me, those things were the final nails. And, following from those words that I wish I had never said, I too received the final nail in my coffin of life.

  The saddest part wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust her like I said I would. It pains me so much, but, I hated her when she died. Knowing that I couldn’t resolve the things I had caused left me with a lack of closure. I couldn’t tell her how sorry I really was, or how much I really loved her. I had chances but failed to take them. I was too bitter, too angry, and too upset. It is the hardest thing in the world to lose somebody. It is ever harder to hate somebody you love, and then lose everything.

  It was after she died that I took to silence. Thinking that if I could say things that hurt another person so badly to dissolve any love for me, allow their heart to crumble because of things I said, that I would never speak again. Never talk for fear that it would destroy anything else I had. But, it is too late, I have no way back and am now deeper than I have ever been. Lower than I ever imagined a person can feel. And, perhaps the way she felt was of equal sorrow. A painful hatred towards me, and one completely deserved.

  I loved her but I don’t know why, and I still do. I don’t know how it came to be that I said those words that shattered our existence and parted our eternal souls.

  I leave the castle and walk back to the train station, my head spinning as dizziness consumes me again. It feels like I want to break out of my own skin. I want to scream as loud as possible, scream at the top of my voice until there is nothing left in my lungs, until there is no buzzing in my head. I just want to be empty, but perhaps I already am. I want to be alone more than ever before, but at the same time, I want to be wrapped up in the body of someone I love. I am completely in limbo, but impossibly in limbo, and destined for hell.

  On the train to Beppu I take a beer and fall away into a peaceful dream about climbing over a mountain with a harp.

  20

  As I wander from Beppu Station, I feel without ideas, more than ever. I don’t really know why I came all this way. I don’t really know what I will find, if anything.

  I walk around, until I eventually stumble into the cemetery that brought me here. It is a lot smaller than I imagined, despite the large population of elderly people here in Beppu to retire from life.

  The sun is breaking through the clouds as I wander the rows of gravestones. Wooden sticks with beautifully written text tell me the names of the people that remain.

  I eventually find a small map. Plot 241 is marked and is not so far away. My destination is beyond a large group of trees that house chirping birds, and where a murder of crows drift above, forming invisible outlines in the summer sky.

  As I walk along the field of death, I don’t know how I am feeling. Only emptiness remains inside of me now. A shell of a man, abandoned because of lies and left to explore the world on my own. And, the world I found was far from pleasant.

  I think again about her, why she did the things she did. Why she gave off the impression that she was lying, fuelled my suspicions, yet, left me no proof that anything was wrong. I wonder if anything really was. I wonder if all of that was in fact in my head.

  Still, a burning hatred at the time consumed me, and it must have been with reason; a sense. But nobody can know for sure. Nobody now can tell me for sure, and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t anyway.

  Instead, I am just as alone as I felt back then, just as alone as when I lost her, and just as alone as I will always be from now. Just a lost animal waiting to be found, but with no way of knowing how to better be discovered.

  I eventually arrive in the vicinity of the plot that I came all this way to see, but instead, I see something else. Someone else. A small child, perhaps eight years old. A girl. She stands over the gravestone in a trance-like state, before slowly kneeling down. She is completely still for a moment; the stillness washes over her. I slowly begin to approach, and the snapping of a twig under my feet stirs her silence and brings with it her attention.

  She turns to face me, and smiles, and her eyes, I notice her eyes. Deep brown. Deep-set. Ichiyō’s eyes, the same eyes as the ghost herself. Liar’s eyes, the same eyes I see every day in my thoughts. The same eyes, undoubtedly.

  I try to say something but the words don’t come. I try to speak but my mouth doesn’t produce any sound. Completely muted, only silence forms. And, in this complete silence, the girl turns her head back toward the ground, and then, like the man at the temple, she too disappears; fades away like a ghost. And then she is gone.