Haunted.

The world is always changing, but I like to believe it is actually the same. It really depends on how you look at it. If the world implies the people to you, then yes, it is changing. Everyday. However, in a rather larger perspective, it isn't. People may keep adding new buildings and roads everyday, but a majority of them stay back. I believe that the people who die, or even the living people, have the capability to haunt. They haunt the place they have spent a lot of time, or even a moment worth a lifetime, at, in the form of memories, or distant echoes that somehow eerily exist. The Statue of Liberty, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Taj Mahal, or even that old house on the neighbouring street - all those buildings built so many decades (in some cases even centuries) ago..they are all haunted. Haunted by the people who lived in them, who dropped their last sweat to see the completion of their creation. Even a house where we have lived for a considerable amount of time, I don't think when we move on, we move altogether. We leave a part of us behind, the part which haunts the place forever. Even if that room or building is gone, that space of air still remains that had once touched us. We are all ghosts, whether we want it or not. And even while we're walking down the road, whether we feel it or not, there is the ghost of the person who walked it before us, maybe laughed, cracked a joke with a friend..even that laughter remains. That building over there, dark and locked, I can hear the old man changing the channel and laughing at his wife's wit, even though it has been ages since they both passed away. It does not matter if I've seen him or not, the face is unknown but the everything else - it's like I've known them all my life. I can also hear the newspaper boy shouting while professionally throwing the rolled up paper onto the balcony, waving and smiling in retort at the old couple as he passes by. I can hear the group of college kids sitting on the corner of that road, all of them without a face but with voices only well known, at 1 A.M. in the night, getting drunk and laughing, even though they are now working in different parts of the world, apart. Maybe you can hear it too, if you are open to hearing it. Or maybe I'm just not normal. My mother once told me of a very intriguing theory she came up with herself while she was growing up. It is a well know fact (for science students at least), that energy remains constant in any isolated system. It can neither be created, nor destroyed. It may change forms, but it remains. So what if we were to assume this entire universe as a whole isolated system? Also, we know that sound is a form of energy. Thus, everything ever spoken, every sound ever made, every word ever uttered, is there around us, always, invisible. From the moment Man's life on earth on began till today and continuing, no word spake has left this universe, it's all around us, in the form of energy. Every emotion, every experience expressed in words or sounds, it's all there and here to stay. It's around you right now. Doesn't that send a chill down your spine? It does mine. It's haunted. Everything is. We're all connected somehow, the different generations. Who knows where we'll go once we die. Maybe join our ancestors in some possible post-death haven, or maybe just fizz out into nothingness. Whatever be it, whether we live or die, the ghosts we leave behind will continue to stay and haunt the places we leave, as memories keen on holding on, eternally.