Walkabout

The spirit had been slain some thirty-four years ago, had slipped from the split skull of its avatar and thereafter was set wandering. Instantly it had forgotten who it had been, a low-level government functionary or a dental hygienist or high school teacher. Losing awareness of who it’d once been, it also couldn't name what manner of death had brought it into this wandering condition. Perfectly innocent, returned to a wholesome spirit insularity, it floated across the countryside and suburbs and cities of the earth, blind to other spirits around it. 
We should pause here and consider: could it have once been one of us? Was it truly aimless? According to certain mythologies it was merely being faithful to its nature, standing over puddles to examine its lack of a reflection, squatting next to children scratching with sticks their name in the dirt. 
An old tradition, dying, and one easily upheld. It’s what waits on the other side of dying that remains intriguing, beyond reach of the morbid-minded and the curious. 
This spirit, we think we’ve met its acquaintance before. Wandering yard from yard in the outskirts of Kyoto or Tofino, taking pause now and then for reason we can't name. It seems not everywhere, but anywhere at once, a quantum apparition. Here it stands on the other side of a subway train window pulled into station in Moscow, beads of rain reflecting in multiple miniatures the nothing that it is. There it slips through the tight alleyways of Gamla Stan in slow pursuit of tourists. We would do worse to call it one of our own, an honorary person. But that of course would be a mistake. Long ago it was jettisoned from personhood and stepped beyond any mortal reference points, orphaned without ever enjoying a proper parent. Maybe this is our role? A lonely spirit’s many hundred million parents? 
Pleasant to consider, we’ll pocket that. Something to mull over on winter evenings or when we lay in bed waiting for sleep to integrate us into our dreamworlds. 
Cold tonight. Rainy. Weather often has a way of influencing our ideas. In the mood to contemplate the lives of spirits, we track this one as it flits from city to city to country to country to cargo ships drifting across broad undocumented oceans. This one, we’re sure of it now, we’ve met before. We know it well but can’t yet place from where. Teleporting from place to place without any bystander to wonder over its arrivals or vanishments. Mute, blind, tongueless, touchless; immaterial as space-time. Yet look how it moves, one step forward, another to the left. Ever unsure, it enters an apartment building and stands a while in its foyer through the early morning hours. Shy in a way. Hesitant. 
Should we say it? It’s not always interesting fare to sit and watch the course-less wanderings of such spirits. Some of us have compared it to caretaking after a sick relative, a loved one drifting through dementia. Apt comparison, since there seems proof, from the indecisiveness, the false starts and pauses of its movements, all memory has left it, stranding it without guidelines in the present moment, the present moment, the present. With this one, clearly the case. The present tense has entered into it and begun working like a disease, hollowing out the particulars within its mind, if it still has any. 
Moved by pity some of us ask: would it be possible, to put it out of its misery? 
How can you lay a mercy killing on something that’s already dead, the rest of us answer. 
Through mountain passes, down highways at night in the middle of summer, across deserts, exiting rain forests onto muddy roads that lead to under-regarded border towns. Adrift and restless. Looking for a place where it might find another body lying on a bed, waiting to be entered. But searching for years and finding none. 
We can relate. From time to time we’ve also been there. Forsaken by circumstances and looking around for a face to share. Time wasn’t running out; it was running towards us. Was it an option to turn and flee? Do so and we’d be branded cowards, undeserving of what a personal share of fate might bring us. Standing still, accepting the hours and minutes, we affirmed our mortal rights. We consorted with our familiars, who were, far as we could tell, individuated versions of ourselves. 
With this spirit, not so. 
Look there, beyond where the airport’s tarmacs end. A figure stepping slow with arms to its side, chin raised to watch the underbellies of planes lift and roar over. That’s how it was supposed to be; what the holy mythographers told. Ascension upon death. Each minute’s yield of the newly dead carried as a group towards some transcendent reward. How bitter to find otherwise. To be a grounded passenger all the while. We stand at the other end of the runway, wave it over. Come back, come join us. But no, keeping true to its nature, it turns. Slips across grass and gravel and through a tall chainlink fence, towards some other patch of domesticated wilderness. 
We let it go then look to ourselves.