Ghosts

I get off the bus and there they are. Four ghosts piled in the corner of the sidewalk I watch them everyday on the way to work and sometimes on the way home. Always four, sometimes they look like fallen cocoons and others like a shapeless mass. Bodies, they are only bodies. They are a part of me because of the daily encounter and nevertheless they aren’t more than an entity like the light post of the same corner where I find them. I’m not interested in their existence. I’m more interested in their nonexistence. The daily expectation of not meeting with their dead empty eyes, the desire of not having to listen to their voices, the anxiety of passing by their side and being recognized as the gray shadow of everyday.
Several times I’ve met with their dimmed eyes; they look at me with the coldness of watching the emptiness. Then I speed up my steps to forget the encounter. I could change my way but I find a morbid pleasure in passing by the dead. Sometimes I wonder what they might have been before being dead or if in fact they are dead, if they are there or if they are a product of a game of my mind.
They are ghosts, they don exist, not even for themselves. And in spite of their nonexistence they receive the glance and comments of those who watch them. As if their nonexistence was their only way of being. As if there wasn’t anything previous to their death.
They are dead because no-one remembers them before all they are is this shapeless entity of piled bodies over the sidewalk. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the ghost.