Haunting Words

Do words haunt you too?

I know it sounds weird but I have been haunted by words for some time now. Now there are different kinds of words that haunt.There are words that someone else told you and you liked them so you keep remembering them and feel happy. Now that would be a 'good' words-ghost. But it could be the other way, something you didn't like, something that hurt you or shook you to the core, something that you never expected and you had no reply to those. Those words might make you feel angry or weak or betrayed or just sad. And each time you remember them, that feeling is renewed, may be even magnified. Now forgetting would be an apt way of solving the problem but memory is often treacherous and mostly too independent. So the next thing to is to set out to prove those words wrong to yourself if such a thing is possible. If not, then as they say, time is a great healer.


Then as one of my friends pointed out there are words that you have said to someone and probably regretted. Those words also haunt. The solution is to find that person and make amends but most of the time there are other things that prevent you from doing so - pride, ego, fear, lost relationship and sometimes absence of communication.

For someone who tries to read every written word that he has his eyes on, words from flyers, books, posters and even graffiti may turn into ghost-words. And as before there are good ghosts and bad ones. And this time I cannot think of a remedy.

Words from books and movies haunt me sometimes. At times I know the reason and it is easy to get used to them or to find a remedy and at times I have no idea why they keep haunting. I try talking about them to somebody just to get them out of my mind and most of the time it works. The problem is to find a person who would be willing to talk about some abstract set of words. That's were blogging helps. ;)

But there is a fourth type of ghost-words that haunt me and they come from nowhere. Literally nowhere. Some morning all of a sudden I will keep repeating some phrase in my mind. I try to fit them somewhere but they don't fit. I don't know why I remember them. I don't remember having heard or read them nor even telling them to anybody. I try to figure if I had written something like that somewhere (recently or even not so recently) and they are not there. It is so frustrating! It is like trying to find the someone's identity with no success.

The problem is if I don't know why or from where I got hold of them, I have no way to prevent them from haunting me. Not only I cannot do something about them myself but I cannot talk or blog about them either because they exist as just four little words! So what do I do then? Sometimes I write a poem and if I like the result then I thank them for haunting me. But poems don't come as easily these days as they used to. :(

PS: The words that are haunting me now for the last few days are "On a day like today".