The ghosts that exert the most power in people__ lives-at least, the people I know__end to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.

Mark nodded even though she couldn't see. He'd suddenly lost any desire to talk, and his plans for a perfect day washed away with the stream. The memories. They never let him go, not even for a half hour. They always had to rush back in, bringing all the horror.

This isn__ how things were supposed to happen. I was supposed to be me. Not this.

He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.

Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.

There's no consciousness without senses and memories.