October 19, 2025
We like to think of the past as something that lives behind us, an old house we’ve moved out of, the furniture gone, the lights off, the door locked. But the truth is, the past keeps a spare key. It shows up uninvited, usually when you’re brushing your teeth, driving in silence, or trying to fall asleep.
Faulkner wasn’t being dramatic when he said “The past is never dead.” He was being honest. The past doesn’t disappear; it evolves. It hides inside the stories we tell ourselves, the choices we make, and the ghosts we still entertain.
Maybe that’s why nostalgia hits so hard. You can hear a song or smell something familiar, and suddenly you’re right back there, twenty years younger, making the same mistake, feeling the same ache. Time doesn’t travel in one direction; it loops. And sometimes, it loops just to remind us that we’re still learning from what came before.
I think that’s also why haunted places captivate us. Eastern State Penitentiary, for example, a crumbling Philadelphia prison that looks like regret built out of stone. People say it’s haunted, but maybe it’s just full of memories that refuse to rest. Maybe every cold spot is a story that still wants to be heard.
We all have our own haunted prisons, the decisions we can’t unmake, the conversations we wish went differently, the people we wish we hadn’t lost. The trick isn’t to banish those ghosts. It’s to learn to live with them. To let them whisper their lessons and then walk beside them, not behind them.
The past isn’t past. It’s part of the present, the soil that today’s roots grow in. You can’t cut it away without losing part of yourself. But you can tend it. You can learn from it. You can finally forgive it for being so persistent.
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