I never went to hotels. I spent most of my life in hospitals, cursed to endure the static illness and suffering of dilated cardiomyopathy. Every day, I dreamed of a heart transplant, hoping it would allow me to escape the hospital and start anew.
One day, the usual noise erupted outside—ambulances, shouts, screams, and cries. Oddly enough, I woke up to these sounds with a sense of happiness, knowing that someone had died. Is it strange? Perhaps. But isn’t the true nature of humanity to preserve itself? I am human, and I wanted to live, even if it meant others had to die—as long as I wasn’t the one ending their lives. I wanted that heart transplant soon because I was sick of this place. That day, a hotel employee, struggling under immense pressure to keep the financially crumbling establishment afloat, ended his life. A man saved, a man died.
After the operation, my friends and I were ecstatic. They invited me to celebrate my new life, and we eagerly packed our things and set out for a good time. We played, swam, ran, talked, and walked until we barely noticed the sun setting. Eventually, we headed back to the hotel. As I laid my head on the pillow, I heard scratching sounds from the walls. At first, I thought it was just the old hotel making strange noises. But then I saw someone walking, and my heart stopped for a moment. The figure passed through me like a ghost. “Wait, what? A ghost? It can’t be,” I said to myself. But there it was, reappearing in a chair in my room, staring at me as if I owed it something. I asked, “What do you want?”
The ghost responded angrily, “You have something that belongs to me, and you were so grateful that I died, like I was trash.” He continued, his tone now more confident, “The blood that runs in your veins is thanks to my heart. And you were ignorant, never asking about the real reason for my death.”
The ghost told me he was there to kill me, revealing that his boss had pushed him, cracking the office window, and sending him to his death. But after witnessing my brutal happiness, he reconsidered ending my life. He said that his heart had never experienced joy in his own body. The ghost recounted stories that I couldn’t remember when I woke up in the hospital, with a nurse leaning over me saying, “Congratulations! Someone died today, and he fits your medical profile. You’re getting that heart.”
“Who was he?” I asked. She replied, “A hotel employee who threw himself from a window.”
Mental illness is a vital element in our lives. After the encounter with the ghost, I was released from the hospital, not because of the heart transplant, but because my mental state was declared stable.
This revelation marked a turning point—not for my heart condition, as I had believed, but for my mental state. I wasn’t released from a cardiac ward but from an asylum. The diagnosis was clear: my battles were with mental specters, not physical ailments. My name is Jack, and this tale of ghosts, imagined and real, is just the beginning of my journey through the shadows of my mind.
My name is Jack, and this is the beginning of my story.