(12/8/23)

I ran into a ghost today. Not a literal ghost, but also not figurative. A year ago an acquaintance of mine in high school took his own life. It was over summer break. No one really knew him well. I sat next to him in algebra and I can not remember a single thing we talked about. I can only remember his face. I logged back into my old Snapchat account today to show Tyler a couple of photos that I had saved, and I discovered that this acquaintance had sent me a friend request a while ago. I had never accepted it. It was a couple months before his death, so I didn't feel at fault or anything, I just feel off. It was strange looking at his Bitmoji approximation and knowing that the internet remembers all. The human race haunts it. Our very existence is etched into its surface like the tomb of a Pharaoh. That means all the good, all the bad, and everything else. It keeps this acquaintance suspended in a Bitmoji epoxy. There is nothing sacred about this rest. The bones still move without us. His Bitmoji smiles still. I tried to explain this to Tyler but he never had Snapchat. However, he had sneakily read enough YA horror fiction to know a couple things about hauntings. He said that ghosts only haunt those that cared about them.

~clancy