They Appear from Nowhere

“What is Past is Prologue.” The Tempest. It's the young ghosts that haunt us most. A vison of my 6-year-old self, looking up from a basement window at the gray pavement above my head. It scared me then and still does. One dead-eyed day in a wintery city I saw a man without a coat crouched and shivering, the coat that he did not wear that day I wore at that time. The more I looked, the more I understood. Such younger ghosts are spectral preludes, phantoms of our psyche, sealed into a setting, just large enough for them to relive forever a one-act play of our soul-etched moments.