#461

Returning to the subject of skeletons (yes! yes! Factually Macabre 2024 continues!), perhaps nothing is so iconically and universally used to symbolize the fearful and gruesome aspects of death itself, though it is in actual fact essential to life, part of a living body, and is merely the most enduring of a certain kind of organism's structure. A human skull should no more symbolize death and evoke fear than a seashell, or a dead leaf. 

And yet it does.

Skeletons could never hurt you, unless they were indeed animated by dark magicks or the like. They cannot in actuality hold themselves up. It's not merely a matter of nothing attaching the joints and bones themselves--the very cohesion we grant a skeleton, its human shape, is a human conceit, a deception. A skeleton is a pile of useless junk. The parts are nothing without the life of the whole. Bones do not support themselves just to make a shape, they are parts of how a leg is, they hold suspensions in a stasis, they change densities and temperatures throughout the course of a day, they are affected by the physics of the tendons and the unceasing contraction and relaxation of the muscle fibers. A skeleton does not walk; it floats. It is not wired together or marionetted like a puppet, it is flowing and falling and breathing and mostly water, and the dried-out husk that lives in the human imagination brimming with jealousy and evil intent is nothing more than persistent minerals reminding us that no one grows too old, and it really is no big deal.

And yet it is.

For some reason, most of us shudder. And indeed, given everything I have just said, to witness a skeleton standing on its own? Would shit myself instantly. I have destroyed probably hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million skeleton enemies in video games and I have trained my mind and spirit to welcome death as a release and an adventure, and still, in present tense and living color, a skeleton would freak my whole composure to pieces. 

Thankfully, they can be summarily destroyed. Not like a fucking ghost.

*

Ghosts next time? I'm thinking ghosts next time.

--JL