The Museum

Body

I watched letters typed up on an old screen I remember from when I was very little, thinking of my grandmother taking my hands and asking if I was sure I wanted to look. I want to say curiosity got the better of me and I pressed my small fingers onto the blue circles, but there was something about the darkness of the screen and the glass in front of me that made me turn and run. Young children don’t understand the immensity of seeing a human skeleton curled up in a box, someone that was once standing and breathing who thought and smiled and remembered. And what, 10 years later I’m stood in the same spot with my fingerprints on the glass and waiting for the lights to turn on.

And then they did.

Brown earth shrouded the bones as if to shield it from prying eyes, a reminder that we all go back to the same place we come from: from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, we’re all the same inside. Now this Egyptian skeleton never saw cars or skyscrapers or planes. He would have never seen laptops or phones or telephones. But it’s the same Earth that we walk on, the same Sun we lie under, the same stars and seas. I wonder who he was and who he would have been in this day and age. I wonder if he knows that every day someone thinks about him when he’s been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years.

I wonder if that’s why people so readily want to donate their bodies to science. Because they don’t want to be forgotten, they want to be remembered. Sure, they say it’s to further medical research, so they can help others, and I’m sure for some people this is not the case. We humans are absorbed in the idea of not being forgotten but we don’t do anything that’s worth remembering. If we do something worth remembering, it’s so that we’re not forgotten. There’s something twisted in that, wanting your life to be remembered by people who never even knew you, but there’s something so treacherously human in that too.

Part of me wonders if while we stood there in our baggy jumpers and lopsided shorts, there was someone else with us too. I wonder if the skeleton was behind us, not skeletal anymore but in his essence. I wonder if he sees little children running away and is grateful because the sight of his own bones is shocking enough for him let alone an innocent child, or if he wants them to press the glowing buttons and see him in all his dead, earthy glory, because he was a man worth remembering. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he drifted through his life having achieved nothing, but either way his body is now on full display to be marvelled and gazed upon by eyes that didn’t exist when his did. Maybe this man achieved more in his death than in his life and maybe, just maybe that’s okay.
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Bones

Thousands of years after my birth I am still here. 

At this moment in time, I am meant to be non-existent. My bones are supposed to have been buried so deep in the ground that I should be parts of trees by now. I should make up the layer of earth that my great-great-great grandchildren walk upon, I should be be the mud that is beside the river, the grass between strangers’ toes.

But that happy fantasy is just that: a fantasy. The truth is, I’m in a glass case and I have been for god knows how long. All I do is stand behind my own bones as I watch children back away in fear or press their fingers to the glass in morbid excitement. Mothers hurry their children away, feign interest in an Egyptian vase- ‘look, kids, it’s such an interesting design!’- or point out the exact cracks and crevices in what was once my skeleton.

After so long I’m still deciding as whether I’m grateful to be here or not. In a morbid kind of way, it's amusing to see people react to what is essentially humanity stripped down to it’s bare bones so dramatically. I love seeing the same family more than once; the children slightly older, the parents slightly more tired. But the novelty wears off quickly. I lose track of the time, days, months, years. I have memorised the exact words that describe my body, the words that explain the exhibits around me. I know where everything is and I know my spirit's boundaries despite my attempts to break that impermeable barrier and escape. 

My energy weakens the further I go from my bones but I have tried to obtain energy from elsewhere.

There was the time I tried to possess a human vessel, stretch my energy and merge it with hers. But just as an elastic band snaps when stretched too far, her youthful spirit throwing me out with a red flash of anger. There was the time I tried to completely draw out a human’s energy back when I was relatively ‘young’ in spirit and simmering with rebellious rage. After some vacant thought, I chose a middle aged man and focussed on his energy flowing out of him and into me. I visualised a yellow stream like liquid gold entering my ghostly veins and felt myself strengthen, but it wasn't long before I became exhausted and his vessel collapsed to the ground, just as my hopes of escape did. 

So for now, or forever, I am stuck here, dreaming of an afterlife where I am more than my cold cracked bones in a finger marked excuse for a grave.