ghosts.

with halloween just around the corner, the goodwill’s and thrift stores are busily stocking their shelves with costumes of ghouls, goblins, r.i.p. signs and weird candy bowls eager to dispense high-fructose corn syrup in bite sized poison portions. i see it all: adults and kids gearing up for the bedlam, deciding what they want to be, looking for halloween-y knick knacks to adorn their soon-to-be scary porches — and people like me, souls looking for answers to questions amongst the discarded relics of halloweens past.

a few days ago i said some really shitty things to someone i love. the kind of thing you wish you could immediately take back even before the last word has slipped from your lips. like i was a character from the movie idiocracy, okay? yeah. that bad. pit of your stomach stuff. these words were all wrong…it all came out so so so wrong. horrible. scary. i blogged last summer about some unkind words spoken about me that hurt (rumors). not quite the same as the insensitive comments i made, but this error in my judgement was enough to give me a great deal of pause. i don’t like what i said and much of my time these last 48+ hours have been wishing i could take it back, but i can’t. like a ghost i wish the words would just drift away to their rightful place: into the ether, into the past. we all deal with our own haunted pasts, frightening us with lingering proximity to where we find ourselves now. our ghosts are sometimes closer than we would like them to be, hovering about us, begging to be seen, screaming to be heard once again. sometimes it feels comfortable to listen, to try and make out a figure in the misty haze that encompasses the dark. but sometimes it’s best to just look away. it all comes down to forgiveness. forgive the past. forgive your mistakes. forgive yourself for the stupid things you’ve said. forgive the ghosts that haunt you. it’s all they really want, anyway.