Digital Ghosts

I see this every day in my Google Chat sidebar. The imprint remains while the man is no more. He lives frozen all about me, in paintings he’d sat for and photos remembered by my computer, in funny or terse or exasperated or hurried texts in my phone, in Facebook where he lived under the name Kyle Turden and posted rarely, in numerous emails blasted back and forth in temporal oases and deserts, in the stories we can’t help but tell each other more than once in hopes that they don’t break down into dust under the pressure of time. His physical form collapsed, the essence which animated it dissipated into the ether, we were left lacking an essential presence. This I feel more distinctly with time. I cannot stop thinking about him, from time to time, or writing about him when the spirit hits me. If he knew this, he’d love it. I’d never tell him.
