Roommates -- Part Eight

It's funny. This may have to be my last journal entry. I feel like I've barely started, and now that I know that writing this might be a really bad thing for me all I want to do is sit down and write down everything I'm thinking. To organize my thoughts. It's probably a very, very bad idea for me to be writing this right now. I don't know. Maybe I just don't care. I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.

I'm sitting here, and I've got a little leather-bound journal in my lap, and I don't see anything just now, but I don't know just when she's going to come back. I imagine she's attached to the diary. Hopefully she's not attached to me or the house. Or attached to the clothes, or something.

I'm alone again. Gilhen had to go to work, and he promised me he'd come right back here after, and if I needed anything, anything at all, I was to call him right away. I was sort of glad to get rid of him, actually. He wants to help but this isn't his problem and he doesn't understand and I can't be relying on him all the time. It's terrible to dump all of this on him when it's really not his problem.

Besides, if I scream again, Graham will surely rush to my rescue. If he's home, that is. Med school students are supposed to be busy, aren't they?

Right. I started writing this about the journal. I've been reading it. I'm not very far in. There's some normal stuff at the beginning. Just Anna's life. That's her name. Anna. Anna Marie Hodges, I think. The writing is a bit cramped and hard to read in places, so I'm not sure about the last name. It looks like Hodges. Handwriting, unlike typing, can be hard to read.

Wait. Did I mention that I found the ghost's diary and explain how it happened? I probably should if I want to save this for posterity, or whatever. I found a diary. It belongs to the ghost that's in my house, or so it would seem. She longs for release from this, or so she keeps saying, by which I suppose she means the journal.

How am I to release her from the journal? Well, your guess is as good as mine. And if you're reading this journal you're probably me, which means that your guess is exactly as good as mine, unless you've already gotten rid of her, in which case your guess is better than mine, because you know it will work.

I'm rambling again.

So she's trapped in the journal. I think. And Gilhen thinks that all I will have to do is burn the journal and everything will be okay and she'll leave. He said something like, "This is the thing she's been asking you to do to lay her spirit to rest". I'm paraphrasing, but he really did say "lay her spirit to rest."

The thing is, I don't want to burn this journal. Because I know what's in it. I know what happens. She was in an accident. She was badly hurt. There's a gap of a few months in the journal where she wasn't writing, and then she starts writing again and talking about the "accident". That's all she's talked about so far. I know what happens, though, from talking to her. She started seeing ghosts. I know it already. The first few entries after the accident it's obvious there are things she's not writing about. It's restrained. Like in a mystery novel when you know there's something a character isn't telling you. It feels like that.

I had to stop reading when Gilhen had to go to work, (he made me promise not to touch it until he got back, for fear "something might happen". As if things hadn't already "happened".) then I thought I'd write this entry and get everything down. Gilhen actually almost took the journal with him, but I thought the ghost might go with it, which would be good for me, but really bad for Gilhen. Of course, he'd think seeing a ghost was "keen" or something. Dope.

I'm just wondering, if she's become wrapped up in the journal, if she became attached to it, am I becoming attached to this by writing it? Or does it make a difference that I'm not handwriting it? Or that it's not on paper? Will it still trap me? How will I know? Could she have known? If she did, would she still have written the journal?

Or it could be like anything else and just depend on her and the journal and what she recorded and how attached she got to the thing?

So that's why I don't know if I want to be writing this. I suppose I'll ask Gilhen what he thinks. But then, he's so often wrong about things. Maybe I'll do the opposite of whatever he says. I just need some place to write out the things I'm thinking, to work all of this out and I feel like I can't, now, or that I shouldn't. But then, she hasn't appeared to stop me again, so I don't know. Maybe she doesn't realize what I'm doing? Or is she even still here when I can't see her? Where does she go when she's not around pestering me?

Okay, so I don't know that either. This isn't fucking frustrating at all.

Here's a thought: what if I'm trapping her here too by writing about her? And how do I stop that? Erasing something on the computer is not quite as easy as destroying a journal, if that's even the right thing to do. Do I have to take the hard drive out and melt it down to its component elements? Or is deleting the file enough?

And an important thing to consider, what happens if I really do burn her journal? Will it be like burning her? What if she feels the flames burn what is now her home? How will she die? Will she scream? Does she want to die that way? She longs for release, but aren't there limits to that?

Or what if she's talking about something entirely different? What if it's an echo of her previous life when she wanted to be released from seeing ghosts? I mean, I want that too. Is she a person? Does she have feelings? Or is she just a memory that got caught somewhere in the middle?

And what if I burn the journal and it doesn't work? Then she's still around and I've lost any information there might be about what it is that I'm seeing. Could I photocopy the journal? Would she still be in the photocopies, or are they soulless enough not to hold her? If it's the journal that's holding her and not something else entirely. But if it's something else, what is it? I don't like to think anyone would stick around for the sake of two suitcases and a half-dozen dresses.

Maybe I'm missing the point entirely. Maybe she's stuck here because she was murdered and her still-beating heart was sealed up inside the walls by a serial killer and she exists to tell people...

No wait, that was that place over on Robie. The one with the black window.

Har de har har.

I could ask her, but her answers are so...flighty. She never seems to be talking about the same things that I'm talking about. And yet she looks like she's trying. Trying to put it together, but she can't get the words out. Maybe the same accident caused some kind of detach between her brain and what she was able to say. Like the man who mistook his wife for a hat. But then the journal would reflect that, and it doesn't.

She didn't want me writing this before. She said "no." She said a lot of "no"s, come to think of it. Maybe I should take something from that and stop. I just...should I delete this afterward? Am I trapping myself here too?

Okay. So things I need to know.

1. Is she trapped in the journal?
2. If she's trapped in the journal, how do I get her detached from it?
3. Does she even want to be detached from it? And will getting rid of her hurt her?
4. Do I care if she gets hurt as long as she goes away?
5. Will writing this trap me? And if it does how will I know?
6. How valuable is the journal to me? Will it help me understand what's wrong with me if I read it? If it helps me, is it worth it to keep it, despite her being attached to it? (Definitely not) Then could I maybe keep something around reminding me what's in it? Do I photocopy it? Do I take notes? Will any of these things still trap her? If, in fact, she is trapped, and trapped to what she's written.
7. Most important: HOW IN THE BLOODY HELL DO I KNOW ANY OF THE ANSWERS TO ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS?

Okay, that's enough for now. Time to do something else.