Haunted

Hearing footsteps when there’s no one around,
Following me everywhere.
Awaken me, and I no longer dream,
A squeaky door, a noisy stair.

It frightens me back to my solitary self
Where I am only safe alone.
Jesus, won’t you take this haunted heart
And replace this ghost with your own.

Seeing shadows when there’s no one around.
Making sure I wont forget.
Reminding me of every moment in the dark.
Memories are worse than the regret.

It frightens me back to my solitary self
Where I am only safe alone.
Jesus, won’t you take this haunted heart
And replace this ghost with your own.

A recollection that flashes for an instant,
Then always lingers in my mind.
Pulling me down to my desperate past
That I’m so desperately trying to leave behind.

It frightens me back to my solitary self
Where I am only safe alone.
Jesus, won’t you take this haunted heart
And replace this ghost with your own.

My own personal scary stuff

I’m not a very courageous person, but there have only been two times in my life I have been really scared. When I was 9 years old I had a dream that was so horrific it still is vivid and terrifying in my memory. Many years later I realized the dream was probably an emotional reaction to sexual abuse I was experiencing. The other time was waiting to see what would happen to me inside a courtroom.

Both things filled me with an emotional dread that felt tangible. I could taste the fear. Although one thing was a response to something terrible that had happened to me, and the other was a result of something terrible I had done to someone else—they had one thing in common beside this overwhelming sense of panic: Over and over I wished that what had brought them on had never happened. In one case, it was something I deeply regretted and wished I could undo. In the other, it was something I had no control over but wished just the same it could go away.

And these follow us around. We hear disembodied footsteps and see fleeting shadows. We become desperate for things in our past to have never happened. We feel guilty for things we have done, and even guilty for things that have been done to us. In my case, they made it impossible for me to really give myself to someone, to really love. I believe that the one fear eventually lead to the other. When these apparitions would rise up, when I would be filled with shame and regret, I would run into myself, lock the door, and hide.

…But you have to wait for the next song in this journal to find out what happens… (Hint: It’s a happy ending, one Ghost is better than the other.)

___

I made a mistake with the lyrics when I was singing this. Second verse should be “seeing shadows when there’s no one around” and I sang “seeing footsteps when there’s no one around” which doesn’t really make any sense. You would think I would catch something like that, but apparently not until all the mixing was done. So that is what happens when you are haunted!

Also, when I was a kid I used to get on the piano and lose myself whenever I felt alone. So I basically re-visited that in the instrumentals here. (As in—it got recorded the way it came out the first time.)