Ghosts, Shadows & Memories

Other Worldly. That’s how I am. That’s who I am.

My existence is divided between reality and imagination. And it’s an unequal division. And as you have guessed, the bigger portion is in the firm grip of imagination.

The real people in my imaginations, those making imaginary conversations with me and those silently watching me make conversations with other people in the imagination. Quietly observing me, admiring me, loving me, caring for me, growing fond of me.

Shadows, ghosts and memories that live with me every day and every night. That’s who I live with more than the flesh and blood people that surround me in reality.

Laughter. Togetherness. Fights. Anger. Reconciliations. All imaginary. Only my love for them is a reality.

It’s alarming and I don’t know since when, these have come to constitute my life.

These people became part of my world because they meant so much to me. And the more I think of them, the more space I give to them in my imaginations, the more they come to mean to me.

My love for them, my attachment to them is a reality that feeds on my imagination, for want of sufficient fodder of reality to feed on.
And it’s amazing and dangerous how much more fodder imagination can provide than reality.

Thus, reality and imagination feed on each other in a vicious circle spiralling me to dangerous heights.

I have lived and re-lived imaginary conversations and episodes so many times in my mind that the line between reality and imagination has become blurred and smudged.
Sometimes I do not know whether they really said those things or I imagined they said them, whether they had that look in their eyes when they spoke to me or I am imagining they looked at me with those eyes.
I have to impress deep and hard into my mind that line which is blurring and reinforce the demarcation out of fear it will dissolve completely.

But what do I mean to these people? Something. Perhaps nothing.

He passed by my desk, shook hands with two others, and walked out of the floor as they wished him happy journey. He forgot to tell me. Just like that.

And I woke up from my dream. The vicious spiral exploded in a brief moment of painful disillusionment and brought a torrent of tears.

Occasionally a jolt of reality presents enough proof of the fact that these people I live with are mere ghosts and shadows. All their responses, their reactions, the lives they share with me and the relationship they have with me have been created by my mind.
For all the feverishness with which I love them day and night, I am just someone they bump into and greet for politeness’s sake. They like me. Sure. But that’s all.
I know it. It hurts. I resolve to accept and sustain my disillusionment.
But only for a moment.

Before long my imagination engulfs me again and I submerge into the comfortable, familiar abyss of illusions.

When the sentinels and defenders of my good sense try to salvage me, I fool them. I point to them those fleeting moments of smile, laughter and sweetness these people brought to me casually, by the way, without looking back and without noticing how my heart leapt.
And I reassure myself that I mean the world to them. Like they mean to me.

And at last when I have let go a shadow, a ghost, a memory, I have already picked up other shadows, ghosts and memories.

I believe what I imagine so often and so completely, that believing what I see has become unbelievably difficult.

Like those dreamers in that movie who are so addicted to dreaming, to whom dreams have become reality that they go to sleep everyday so they can wake up to their reality.