Loitering ghost

 

He was just loitering outside the garage door. I said whoever you are come back later,
he looked up from the can which he was now pacing toward.
"Hey kid Can't you see I'm busy kicking this can."
I told him to find some other garage door to hang around outside of.
He kicked the can this time moving it meters down to the neighbors garage door. Finally this would get this old bum away from my garage door. He just whistled "swwweeeww".

"If I'm not touching your garage door, why do you care? I'm not even on your pavement and you are out here on a tuesday night worried that I'm kicking around some can."

I turned to face him straight on the wind seemed to blow right through him. Then I said I would prefer to know that there were no street people around the front of my house.

"Well aren't you the neurotic." I began to notice more and more the subtle bluish light aura around the man. I pretended not to hear him.

He said "who are trying to be out here, do you think you are rich, are you supposed to be succesful?"
I told him I planned to get established and set myself up well.

"so you weren't enough and currently are not enough?"
I said I just didn't have enough. I told him I felt I've always been enough. Not convinced at my own affirmation.

"So why tell me this in a panic?"
I told him that I wasn't panicking I just wanted some sort of security for the future.

"So you need a substitute for parents?"

I asked him, why the hell I was explaining all of this to him.

"Well I'm just ghost so you tell me." He replied empty questioning face.

And there it was, I was communicating with a ghost.
But i wasn't speaking out loud I was telepathically saying it all through to him, or he was stealing my responses straight from my head. But my lips didn't open, even so, I said that he must be someone important.

"You'd love that wouldn't you? You'd give yourself a trophy just to be lucky enough to be asssociated with a dead gone somebody. A historic ghost outside your residence, how special!"

I asked him if he would tell me who he was. He jeered an opened grin.
"You think you are a no one but that someday you can become a someone. is that right?"

I told him that he must have it all figured out, despite having been kicked out of heaven, hell or the next little hamster wheel God would have us rolling around on.

He chuckled, "So you planned out your whole life and even planned out how the afterlife would be, speculating about what's got me here derelict infront of your very house."
 
I told him right there and then that my head did it automatically. That my mind was always busy with the future. He spat and kicked a stone that skipped across the bumpy pavement, hit the curb, looked up again and said the following.

"You can't plan jack shit, most of what you got in your life you got through luck. You chalk it up to skill and strategy and all that stupid planning. You go around handing out advice to anyone who will listen about the merits of your efforts. Haughty and all self proud like you are something special, yet under all that big act, you believe you are a no one. You want everyone to take up the same lame mediocre approach you have, the noone becoming a someone."

I nursed my chin and let the ghost continue his tirade.

"You chew on that same leftover piece of fat thrown to you in the form of experiences, favoritism, family support and finanical aid. Imagine the amount of pretending you had to do to convince yourself you really earned everything you have, that your ineffective planning and strategizing has made any difference. And in your void of real talent you reached out to others who helped you build something.
Then you opened your garage door like a right trotten oaf, and started unloading on the ghost of a man who lived decades ago, now completely abandoned to walk the earth forever. Coming upon schmucks like you every time especially tuesday night."

I nodded at him. And asked him if he had any other witty speeches.

"Sure do, common losers are easy to come by. But for people who come from families like yourself it's difficult to lose. Look at the biggest losers in your family. Out of over fifty relations there are one or two real losers, paupers and bingers, people who have squandered their wealth,  but who still manage to convince the majority of them that they are okay. And the many overachievers who were given the benefit of the same conditioning. All walking around on the earth thinking the same line of bullshit you are."

I said to him that he was real creative for a ghost.

"The worst of it is when I look through your windows at you while you are watching the news and see you all denigrating the indigent."

I questioned him and asked what he was doing looking in my windows. I asked him if all ghosts that were banned from the ethereal realms were sent to haunt productive humans.
He laughed out loud.

"People with serious problems don't see us."