Lost at the Start

1.

Would that happen to me if I stayed in this ghost state? Was I stuck like this? Forever? Doomed to walk the Earth until time itself ceased?

That's...

N-no, i-it can't be.

Can it?

My hand now hovering over the door knob, I shook my head. TV shows involving ghosts, or focusing on mediums, usually portrayed something about moving on. And even in fiction that was true a lot of the time. Particularly, usually, I thought—The spirit needs closure. There's something they have to do before they can finally rest.

Under the circumstances I was right, and that was why I was still here even though I was not longer alive, what could that even be? What could I possibly need to do before I could be done with the human realm for good?

A couple of things came to mind—Namely that I'd always weirdly wondered how some of the people I knew would react to my death, especially under...specific...scenarios—But that didn't seem like a good candidate for "unfinished business." If it was, I'd bet 95% of all persons would become ghosts. Whether they realized it or not, I had a feeling most people actually wanted to know how the world felt about losing them, be it good, bad, or exactly what they expected.

The other option...

...

Would confusion over how I felt about someone count? Needing to clear it up, or something? Or...Confusion wasn't really the right word. Maybe...I need to confess how I felt to a person? Out loud? When I'd been afraid to before?

...

Somehow, that didn't seem very likely either. Not for me. Maybe part of it, I guess. Closer, but...Still no.

But I couldn't think of anything else. I didn't have any dark secrets I wanted the world to know now that I was dead; and what they thought wouldn't matter even if I did. As far as I knew, there wasn't anything I wanted to do for the family I left behind, or my friends, because—even though I couldn't remember exactly—I felt like I'd already taken care of that.

I checked the time on my watch—8:26. And it was light outside my room's window.

Hmm...

Before I could decide on which of my two guesses as to why I was still around I'd try and pursue, I needed to know what day it was. So, hoping I'd get lucky on being able to affect the physical world, I turned and headed for my laptop.

It couldn't've been that long since I died—If everything was still in place in my room, and all. Chances were it was just easier to shut the door and let the room be shunned than to try and go through all the junk in it. But once it was decided the pain of packing it all away could be bared, I thought I read somewhere about grief making stuff get packed up in a hurry because it's too painful to look at. Even so, I couldn't remember the date or day of the week when... "I was last here," or whatever.

I could feel the cool material of my laptop under my hand, and I couldn't seem to push through it, so I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped that meant I could lift the screen up and use it.

Thankfully, it seemed I could.

And, as usual, I'd left it on and open to the last thing I was looking at.

...Which was no help in figuring out what happened. Just the usual Maverick Creations home page I usually ended up on and left up when I'd looked around all my usual online haunts and found nothing better to do or to keep my interest.

The top right corner of the screen did tell me it was a Tuesday, though. Late September.

That meant...