"Right, okay, so. You're here because—"

"Yes, yes, you don't have to say it."

"Well, I mean. I am your therapist. So I feel a sort of, you know, a certain obligation to—"

"Just fix it. That's what you're paid to do, right? We don't have to talk about it. You don't have to — you know."

"We do have to talk about it. That's how we go about fixing things. Also, I'm dead, so. I don't get paid. So tell me when it started."

It starts when he wakes up floating three inches above his deathbed.

You can duck your head beneath the water for a little while and enjoy the pressure and cold, but at some point you gotta breathe. So what happens when you get stuck down there? No one holds your head — you just can't get back up. Like it's the nature of things.

Acute Corporeal Aversion.

Labeling it doesn't make it any easier.

Cider wakes up freshly dead, an unseen whisper that holds shape, surrounded by weighty solid things. His wife, dripping wet tears onto a thin hospital blanket. His children, shocked and (shockingly) present. A nurse stands in the corner looking painstakingly empathetic while idly picking dirt from beneath her nails.

The room's the reservoir. The people are water. Cider's thin as tracing paper and all this pressure's gonna—

"So you're afraid of people," his ghost-therapist says in that question that isn't really a question way.

"No, I wouldn't ... I mean it's not exactly like I'm scared of them or anything, it's just—" A beat that lasts a decade. His children graduate college. His wife stops dyeing her hair and lets the grey grow out. "—there's all this squeezing, right? Like I'm getting juiced. All these people are so solid, and they breathe and their hearts beat and every time they speak it's like I can feel their throats tighten up, you know? I can feel that tightness and how all that sound just— just vibrates, like it shakes up all the air, and everyone's always talking."

"Okay. Yes, okay, well. This sounds like a classic case of ACA. My suggestion— excuse me, my professional opinion, is that you isolate yourself from corporeal humanity for, let's say, a century." The therapist scribbles nothing into the air with a pale pointer finger. "Go wander the woods, and come back when you feel rested."

Go out into the world he said, it will be fun, he said.

I'm the type who would honestly just like to keep to myself. The living love to meddle so much! I mean, I used to be one of the living, and I've dealt with so many meddles. Never thought that I would still have to deal with the meddling after death!

Father pushed me out. He wanted me to interact with a human. What? I thought we were never meant to disturb them. But he said "Come on son. You know, how people report supernatural occurrences? Well, they are caused by ghosts wanting to socialize!"

"What.. is that true?"

"Probably." And he turned away.

I've always rejected socializing. The meddling, the arguements and a lot of troubles I'm not willing to be any part of, I've always used every bit of my will power to avoid them during my living days.

Have you seen what the humans can do? Really the escalation is unbelievable. I was killed in the year 1978. Now we are in the year 2023. I remain in my 20s. I don't know, that's just a ghost thing. The 20s people in my time are a complete opposite of people of the same age in 2023. One of the first things about the teens now that horrifies me is the fact that they could spend a whopping amount of their day just looking at these little rectangle things. Last I heard from a group of high school girls, the rectangles are called "smart phones".

Everything is accessible from this tool called "the internet". You could literally search up anything and everything and get a result within a matter of seconds. Having a tool like that would be so good in my time, since I usually have to go to the library and canvas the shelves and browse through multiple books to get the relevent information I require all for the sake of a project that would have to be submitted the very next day. As much as I would love to have something like that in my time, I'm actually scared about how people are so addicted to this internet thing. Social media, that kind of thing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are many aspects of the the modern human that can just frighten me. What I've talked about to say just barely scratches the surface. But I know not every human being on the planet now is scary. Perhaps, I just need to make an effort on my end.

Complaining doesn't leave a good look on me, anyways.

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