Validation from a ghost

It faces a familiar road, one with the footsteps of its fathers and brothers deeply etched into the cracked and dry earth, reminders and shortcuts scattered about. It faces a familiar road and a compellingly convincing voice tells it to take the road without ever looking behind
The end of the road is almost visible just before the horizon, and the ghost hesitates. 
What is this voice and why is telling me to take this road?
What is this voice and why is it so punishingly loud?
What is this voice and who does it come from?
More importantly, why am I letting it decide for me?
As the ghost takes seconds, minutes and hours in hesitation, it feels its neck tightening as if being pulled towards the end of the road. The ghost is unyielding and feels almost brought to life with the pain of its neck being pulled. 

The ghost sees the trees and flowers that dot and line the scenery that embraces the road of peril. It sees how the sun burns the trees’ leaves with a glistening amber flame. It sees how the sun mocks the sky by lending its gold to the neighboring clouds for them to admire and for the sun to rob when it sleeps. The flow of the stream beside the patch of colorful flowers ebbs and flows with a tremendous tide of poetry. The lonely silence sings with a passionate music that shames even the sweetest of melodies. 

By this time, the phantom neck of the ghost would have already been pulled from his very body, mangled and bloody as it gets dragged toward the road’s end. Worse still is its imagined heart, crushed to a fine bloody pulp by an intense yet abstract feeling of weakness and dissatisfaction. The ghost feels the effects of these and begins to turn a shade bluer than usual. The already-visible bones in its scrawny frame become more pronounced and the ghost’s cheeks and eyes become increasingly hollow. The ghost turns into a ghost of itself. 

The voice inside the ghost’s shell takes a second to catch its breath, and without a trace of hesitation, the ghost turns back and bounds for anywhere but the destination of that road it was already on. 
As the ghost dashes to anywhere but there, the phantom pain and pull it feels intensifies. 
Finally, it settles for a pond a handsome distance from the road. It can barely see the tracks through the thickness and foliage of the trees. 

As it catches its breath, the truth hits the ghost on its imagined head like a brick. The ghost was conditioned and brainwashed into a life that only had regret and misery waiting for it, just as the ghost saw in flickers in its father’s eyes. 

The ghost sought for a life that meant joy and glee for it, unlike its shell, who it was chained to. The chains would yank and pull at it to the end of that road because that was where it was forced to be. 

“in this road to the profession that was chosen for me, I look back and see the artist inside me being dragged by the heavy chains of my spinelessness. I am fated for the worse form of doom – to live my life unhappily and forever wondering what would have become of me had I went with my passion”

target practice

With the sun about to retire from its day of condescension and needless pride, the unwelcome fluorescence of pain floods into the open stitches of the cracks of his being. It was an exhausted day of seeing faces and hearing noises and feeling through calloused fingertips, and it was time for him to retreat, although the usage of the word ‘retreat’ is defeated by the fact that he has to face a more lethal and sinister form of numbness – bandaging the bullet holes in his body in a zone of relentless warfare.

He asked himself how he came to be that way -beaten and broken. Then he realized that whatever happened had happened to ensure that he becomes who he was intended to be, though questions creep in as he asks himself if brokenness was to be his life.

He would go to bed weary from the emotional exhaustion that weighed on his mangled heart, crushing his soul, and causing him to bleed, the blood seeping out of the fissures of his flesh and the sutures of his spirit. He would go to bed terrified, not for monsters or ghosts or specters, no, but, actually for the idea of another day attempting to keep his broken pieces from falling, and having to stare at a stranger after they pick up a piece of him that had probably dropped on the pavement, or the parking lot.

He does not dream, and seldom even sleeps. His relationship with his bed is one filled with mockery and insults that his tears provide. The words ‘failure’, ‘disappointment’, and ‘shameful’ were fired so carelessly as if they were bullets from a machine gun in target practice. This has made it difficult for him to understand the concept of waking up, when his was reality was the nightmare.