He is also there. Waiting, seeing you. He hasn’t get you as scared as she does, but he is always there, really there. You do forget about her presence, if you are lucky for days in a row. But him you can’t forget, not for a second. It is not quite about fear, it is not the shock or the thunder. It is more like those horror movies in which nobody dies, in which the plots goes on and on, tension accumulating or ebbing, yet nothing really happening, and at any moment the end will come and the main actor will still be there and no blood will be shed, none. You are waiting for that end to appear in the screen. But not quite yet, not yet. She haunts you from the corner of your eyes, and doesn’t talk. He does. Not a lot, but just enough.
You pride on your decision making. Not that you are proud of the decisions themselves, but you made them, and made them fast. Very few of them have taken a while, and those are the ones when he talks. Reminds you of this mistake you made, the consequences of that hard decision taken ten years ago, and certainly of what will happen now, if you get it again wrong. Some people believe that being indecisive is like being in quicksand, and you can relate. There is nothing quick about it though, and you hate it. It is more like if you would be one of those poor dinosaurs, not aware that they are having the privilege of being choosen to pass to the far future, millions and millions of years away. The only thing that they could be aware is of the dense tar, making it harder and harder to move. The fumes are asfixiating it, and the dinosaur doesn’t know why. In moments it will submerge and die, but those moments feel like eternity, like the eternity that they will remain in the tar of what we call “La Brea”, that place where we recover the fossils of those monsters that lived so long, long ago. That is how you feel now, without moving forward, or anywhere for what matters. Just sinking, sinking in the memory of what you did once, in his words asfixiating you, drowning you.
And then, what if you aren’t the only one? What if your friends, what if the people you love, and why not, also the people that you hate, what if all of us do have our own ghost just there, talking now and then, about what did happen that time that you and only you know about? What if that running always ahead, ahead! of some is the running from their own past talking, the unbridled desire of leaving him, or her, behind. Or what if that flicker of a weird face that you wouldn’t notice if you would not be looking for it, that flash you see when asking about something that happened before, anytime before, that looking above the shoulder that almost isn’t there, is them looking for him -or her-, is them checking for the voice to start, or not. What if?
I have heard that expression before, as much as you have. I just don’t get it, not really. What does it even means, all past time was better?