Susan says “When one person ghosts another, the ghosted person is haunted by an absence.”

This haunting can happen while the vanished person lives, and in this form ghosts, ghosting and haunting and all that spooky stuff seems metaphorical.

But if the vanished person leaves this world without proper closure, the ghost is now the realest part of that soul. The ghost outlives — and in fact outexists — the corpse and corpus of the departed, and continues rippling and rattling through the living matrix in configural spirals of empty angst, eternally unfinished business, hanging in the ether.

You can spend your whole life sitting around cross-legged in ascetic bliss, humming mantras or shouting them, seeking your own individual salvation, as if salvation happens that way. You might think you redeemed yourself from your own covenantal ground by declaring it null and transplanting yourself somewhere less soiled.

But if you run around summoning being with others only to coldly ghost them with unexplained disappearance, maybe focus your expanded consciousness on a simple, earthy truth: that void you nulled is your future.

The void you leave in living souls is who you remain after your final rattle.

The part of you that you mistake for yourself will dissipate. The part of you that you despise will live on, and on, and relentlessly on in the despicable.

Most of us start planting our ghosts decades before our souls are harvested. Let us take care, as we speed together to our graves, never to forget: the people we ghost might be “dead to us” while we live, but once we, ourselves, are dead, those abandoned souls are all we have of immortality.

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