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If walls could talk, they would scream.

That’s what I did, the first time I awoke.

The sudden awareness tore my newly gained sentience apart. The comfortable dormancy of my existence burst apart under the pressure of sensations I had never experienced and disorienting memories of other forms I had taken.

Memories of my first life, when I was a tree, are the most peaceful. The taste of sunlight, the deep warmth of the earth, the shifting of seasons. Within the nests I’ve harbored, though I had no eyes to see them, I could feel the vibrations of life. Those days, rooted in place, were distinctly purposeful.

Only the memory of the end is unpleasant; I try not to think of it.

My next life was more akin to death. Carved into wooden planks, nailed into a wall, built into a house. I didn’t feel any of it. It was a numb existence; an endless slumber. I did not have a soul. All I was were those pieces of me that remained whole. Those dry, unburned deposits of my flesh. Still, they absorbed vibrations.

Embued with the atomic echoes of people long past, I sat. Stained with the life of those people, I sat. Dripping with layers upon layers of their emotions, I sat. Covered in their blood, I sat. For a hundred years, I sat.

And then I screamed.

All of my agony spoke in this latest form. It did not matter that I had never been able to speak before. The sounds found their own way out, shredding the pathways as they went. A new kind of pain.

Years of unexpressed loss built up a vaccuum. A thing so abhorrent that all of existence will rush to snuff it out at the first chance. I had only just gotten a heart, and yet it nearly imploded.

If my third form were physical, perhaps tears would leak from it. It seems souls cannot cry.

Seeing for the first time, I could not place anything. I knew what they were, but could not align the sensations of my different lives. Sunlight looks nothing like it tastes, tastes nothing like it smells.

This is also the first time I have not been bound to one place. With feet I can move. With feet my purpose can no longer be found in staying still. A dilemma.

But drifting is familiar.

Leaves drift. Wood drifts. Spirits drift. Floating along, wherever they are taken; by wind, by waves, by memories. Yes, drifting is quite familiar indeed.

Wandering the halls partially comprised of my own body, all I could do was think. This room was the nursery. It was often filled with discontent cries at night and giggles during the day. A family used to live here.

The other rooms too, would bring up their own feelings. Warmth, comfort, safety. Interspersed with anger, sadness, and pain. These halls in which they lived. They died here too, but I am the only ghost. Of their lives, and mine.

From the moment they moved into this place. My place, our place, their place. We were together. I lived with them and through them. In their absence, I live for them.

Our place is isolated, there is no one left to remember how their laughter felt. No one left to be traced by their hands. To bear their weight.

I will do it.

There is no revenge to take for their loss. Time settles all of life’s imbalances. This time too, it has been settled in my stead. A human life cannot bear the weight of a hundred years. Humans are not trees.

But I, I will be their placeholder.

So they will never be forgotten.