The Fraid. “Fraid” from the old french freid meaning “cold, cool, chilling”. Death is cold. There had been long conversations about an afterlife defined by a language conceived in breath. Breath, even. Words. There was a period of diffuse consciousness. A sort of madness. It came after the first confusion, that is, to be dead. When all the regular anxieties had faded (which for some took, years, years…) what was left but to wait and to think and to argue. That was what they had decided to call it, then. The Fraid. It sounded like other words, too. It all was neat, and maybe that was a joke. Obviously no one knew who had come up with it. There was no writing, no putting one’s name in stone. Another joke?
Some never emerged from the Fraid. It means nothing to talk of fate, outside of fate’s purview. Some came back, some stayed scattered. They were maybe wise, to stay spread out. There was of course the risk that they would, eventually, reconstitute. There was also always the risk of the day of resurrection. Recorporation in long forgotten forms. That was mostly a joke, and the one’s who stayed scattered had never come back from it. Either you shaped up after a few years, or you kept on living like spread butter.
Language changed, of course. They were ghosts, but even in this extra-space time moved on. It was a preeminent question, that damnation to a voyeuristic hell. Some just shrugged. Life was meaningless, death was meaningless too. It did not signify anything to be a ghost, other than to be a ghost. There were tendencies, ghost inclinations. If they were just eternal echoes of their living selves, then they would go on repeating the final word they ever spoke, psychologically speaking.
Some, who had looked up in childhood and noticed the absurdity of the universe, turned back to their drawing and never looked up again, found something to work on, more iterations of life to imagine. So you had poets, playwrights, orators. Not so many novelists, of course. Nothing to write on. Some extemporizers who might keep you entertained for a long while. What was a long while, of course, couldn’t be discerned. It felt puny, to track time by the clock.
Some who felt apart in themselves, who always secretly believed that they were meant for something, took to making themselves useful. Only in their own conceptions, of course. Is a shadow more a shadow because it is inhabited by a spirit intangible, imperceptible. They thought so, and so they ringed stonehenge and cried out on particularly windy evenings, imagining that it was their wails, and not the wind. Or maybe it was both, maybe they were the wind. They were a part of something, because it couldn’t be proved that they weren’t. The holy spirits, fondly.
There were philosophers. Often the one’s who held most stubbornly to life. Who felt deep down that there was a path. With infinite steps, maybe you could reach the end of an infinite path. They burned out, pretty regularly. Non-infinite minds, it seems, though there’s a few eidetic ghosts, none of them have ever come back together after the Fraid. The philosophers have thoughts on that.
What does burnout look like? The same thought. Again, and again. A sort of screensaver for infinity. That was a trick of hibernation. No one knows who figured that out, but it was important enough to stick around. To pass from ghost to ghost to ghost. Just find a tough nut to crack. Find a memory from childhood. Find a great tragedy. Think it through. Reconstruct it in your mind. Build, and build, and build. Find that exact moment that ingrained the memory. That exact moment. Get closer and closer and…I’ll stop there because I’m still talking and it would be rude to leave you waiting for eternity.
There’s another category, and I’ve saved the best for last. It’s one’s like me, the ethnographers. The pneumatophiles, the ectopologists, whatever you’d like to call yourself. I like ghost writer. I like funny things. I study us, ghosts. It seems a shallow thing, for all I’ve divined. Echoes feels right, and is there much to the study of an echo beyond origination and extrapolation? I like to think so, in between.