Poor, helpless you. Stuck in your big beautiful 5-bedroom colonial for two whole months. Try 200 years!
For just one of your millions of free moments, maybe you could consider how I, the ultimate victim of quarantine, feels. Don’t you think I wish I could have a tea party with my friends or go wake some snakes and cause a ruckus?
The bottom fact is I would literally kill to visit the Anchor Tavern for their famous whipt syllabub but I’m not that kind of a ghost, which is surely why you haven’t noticed me. I’m too nice.
My mother told me that just before I met my untimely death while churning butter. You see, my siblings had been goading me about my lumpy butter and I was so determined to churn something perfect for once in my life that I completely missed the runaway tractor. It had been running ragged for weeks before jumping the field and decapitating me and now I’m stuck here for eternity.
Did you catch that? That’s two months times infinity. Let that rattle around in your thick skull for a moment. It makes a few measly months slogging around in your knickerbockers seem paltry, laughable even.
Do you know what I did in the first two months of my new life as a ghost? I learned to fly. That’s right! Forget your 10,000 steps, I literally swung from the chandeliers, doing somersaults and flips that would make Olga Korbut proud.
And you, you modern man, count every measly baby step from the powder room to the ice box to the electronic washboard and back again. You really should expand your range of movement. What about hurdling or running on walls? When confined to a quasi-cavernous space, it’s imperative to take full advantage of every surface.
I’ve seen the hours you spend staring in the mirror, watching as time and historic caloric intake turns you into a lump with eyes. If I have to watch you throw another bag of cheesy poofs into your sauce box, I may turn into one of those mean-spirited fellows, haunting your dreams and rearranging your trousers.
That was unkind, my apologies. I suppose I’m jealous. After all, it’s been two centuries since I had a reflection. If you can believe it, I was an honest to goodness double-breasted water-butt smasher in my day. I had ladies lining up around the block, smitten as kittens. Ah, to have a pulse once more.
While I’m at it, I must say that when I see you wearing that homemade Disney World t-shirt mask, something inside me breaks. You don’t have to wear it in the house! You can be free! Whereas I’m a prisoner of this tattered white sheet.
I don’t know if I should be grateful for my eyeholes or not because they’ve afforded me the bizarre and time-stoppingly boring view of you as you stare at the rectangle on your wall. You sit, in some sort of wicked trance as the sun rises and sets, hardly moving a muscle. To add insult to injury, after a day spent staring like an asparagus into space, you still feel the need to ogle the air some more and take deep guttural breaths while an invisible Australian man talks about relaxation.
Obviously, you’re lonely. I understand. Perhaps instead of calling your mother for the third time today you could say, “hello there, ghost, how are you feeling?” Would that be so hard? We could commune, get to know each other, share stories about ex-girlfriends. Next time the hair raises on the back of your neck, that’s just me, trying to say hi.
Well, if you do want to chat, knock three times on the linen closet and I’ll be there with bells on. If not, if you’re really going to insist on swanning around the house like you’re the only one here then fine, but it’s really bad manners.
I just hope, for your sake, that when you do meet your maker you don’t come back as a ghost because no spirit worth his salt spends as much time crying as you do.