Lost at the Start

1.

Why am I still here?

I woke up, like I'd been in a deep, dreamless sleep for too long, and suddenly so much information flooded my mind.

Taking in my surroundings, all I could think was, N-no...This can't be...This isn't right. I-I'm not supposed to be here...H-how...W-why...?

I was in my room. But I was supposed to be dead.

That's what I remembered. I died, I was sure of it. I didn't remember when, or where, or how, but I knew I was. I'd felt myself slip away in those last few seconds...

So why I am still here? And in my room, of all places?

Everything was the same. Nothing touched or moved. The door was shut, but that wasn't unusual. I usually kept it closed anyway, except for when mom would come knock and always forget to close the darn thing.

For some reason, I couldn't remember...What happened.

I remembered my last moments, that I was supposed to be dead...But anything of that last day...was gone, as if it'd been wiped from my memory. Poof! Like a magician's trick.

The more I tried to remember, the more I seemed to know about now, rather than that last day, without anyone telling me.

Namely that I was a ghost. Or, at least, the closest thing possible.

I can't explain how I knew, I just did. It was more of a definite feeling than anything else, and since I was alone with no one to tell me anything, that's all I had to go off of.

But the longer I thought, the more frustrated I became.

I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed be dead. Gone. DONE.

And yet here I was.

Scrubbing my hands over my face, I headed for the door. If I kept thinking about this, I was going to lose what little sanity I had left. Then I'd be crazy and dead. Which I briefly wondered was how malevolent spirits were born; They're just "mad" as in crazy and they're the kind of crazy that, in life, would result in them disappearing from the public eye.

I stopped a little short though. If I really was a ghost, did that mean I could walk through walls? Was there a chance I could just will myself where I wanted to go? If I wanted to, could I still affect the physical world?

Thinking about it, I'd read so many conflicting possibilities for the existence of...Well, I guess being undead is a better catch-all term than ghost, really...And I thought back to all those episodes of Haunted and some of the other ghostly-encounter type stuff I'd seen before. I hadn't made a freakish habit of it, but really just enough to become well versed(ish) in some of the different "palettes" for what it's like being dead. Sort of, anyway.

I wondered if what I could do as a ghost depended on how long I'd been dead? Like a weird seniority-thing.

In the back of my mind was consistently one layout of an undead person's life that I couldn't shake—Selective Incorporeality. Essentially; You're only as "there" as you want to be. The instance I was thinking of including two sticking points: You are, in fact, still dead, even if you decide to be "fully" there as you were in life, and you don't age. (Despite being capable of healing and other normal functions of the living, for most part.)

With that in mind, I flashed to the plot of the book I couldn't quite quote before I died. The main character met a girl who didn't age. She'd been around for a long time, she was worn out, and she was ready, after three hundreds years of life, to die.