Our ghosts haunt us, they make us face our regrets. Their words can consume our thoughts if we let them.
These apparitions are memories, regrets, and heartaches. They’re the embodiment of what we could’ve done better.
Recently I’ve been accosted by the very memory of my daughter, but it was long before Tombstone that I’ve been confronting her spirit.
Where tragedy is involved, it can be an inferno for your soul if you suppress the torment those spirits have wrought upon you, and it will burn you up from the inside out.
Heart and soul, they can consume you, but with either guidance or experience, they can be a catalyst for great change and improvement.
Faith, you saw things that shook your core. Things you’ve never seen before and couldn’t walk away, instead, it tore into you. You had your haunting, both you and your father. It exposed things so terrible you wish you could cram them into a box and lock them away forever.
You now have words running through your head now that can never be taken back. They hang over your head like the sword of Damocles and you want to wait for it to drop.
I know every time you go to sleep you hear her voice asking, “Why did you let me die?” It’s an apparition that’ll dig into your psyche if you let it, James.
It’ll start accosting you in the heat of battle. I’ve seen it happen to others and happen to myself. You’ll be no different.
You’ll be the one feeding those memories, giving them the kindling to become a raging inferno, no different than the one that took your mother’s life, only it will burn you up, consuming you from the inside out.
Now, I have my experience to guide my ass through my haunting. When I close my eyes, see her face, and hear Michael’s voice I know how to contextualize it, to use it to drive me forward, without going off half-cocked.
So, young Mr. Jackson, it’s my turn and my guidance doesn’t come from a place of love and understanding. No, I’m a man who remembers your father’s exploits well, and right now you’re not even half the hero he is right now.
No, you’re just little James “Faith” Jackson a young man about to face the Arcadian Ghost. An apparition that has walked this plain for decades who’s too old to die young and James when I haunt someone, they usually never find them.
But this time, my goal will be to accost you and break you, so Maxwell can build you back.
When that bell rings this week Faith, Nobody is going to be all around you the heat and pressure stronger than an inferno and this time you won’t escape because momma isn’t here to save you.
You will burn without a flame. I will consume your being without so much as taking a single bite.
And when I’m done, Nobody will remember you as you are now, a petulant young man running from his fears.