The ghosts
What does it feel like to be a ghost?
Imagine you are in a room. This room is perfectly circular, with an infinite circumference. Along this endless wall are doors, evenly spaced, visually identical to each other. Although this room has an infinite circumference, and you stand at the very center of the circle, every door is just a step away.
Each door represents a particular place and moment in space and time. Variable and unpredictable. Behind one door might be five minutes spent in a house in Richmond, VA on March 14, 1975. Behind another door is 23 years in the Sahara beginning in November of 1420. Yet another is just a second on the deck of a starship approaching the Orion galaxy in the year 2430. Random moments across time and known space stretching forward and back. No rhyme nor reason to the placement or the destinations, as far as you can tell.
You step through a door and you are there and then. Visible to anyone at that particular time and place, yet not fully present in a corporeal sense. You are a ghost.
When the moment ends, be it a second or a decade, you return to the center of the room. You have no idea which door was the last one you opened. You have no way to mark the doors. Opening a new door will take you somewhere, somewhen, and that might be connected to the last place you visited or not.
As a ghost, you will be in this room for all eternity. Never growing hungry or tired, never having any options other than to go through the doors or stand and do nothing.
An infinite number of doors, an infinite amount of time. Each moment you visit gives you the chance to interact with others, hear voices, see people, experience something. Sometimes you go through a door and spend decades on the other side, almost living a life. Sometimes you open the door and see someone you knew, someone you loved, when you were alive.
With time, because you have nothing but time, you imagine there is a pattern, some underlying logic or narrative to the moments you visit. You overlay some divine plan onto the encounters you have, even suspect there is a guiding force behind it all. Now and then, you return to the exact same moment and you try to do something different.
Perhaps in this randomness there are signals, signs, coded messages that can give you the answers you seek. You tell yourself a story, built from unrelated encounters across time; a story that comforts you. You see a face that you have seen before and that person becomes your guardian angel or your malevolent devil. Words repeated across time and space form sentences and then sermons. Clearly there may be a conspiracy behind all these doors.
The wolf teaches us about image, trust, and truth. The ghosts teach us about certainty and uncertainty, time and intention.
Tomorrow, we meet the the librarian.