“Why else would we surround ourselves with photos, trophies, trinkets, useless pieces of paper -all these things that remind us of yesterday? We need that connection to who we were in order to retain who we are. It is a very human thing indeed. That is fine, but many people leave their home at one point or another and when they return they always expect it to be exactly the same as they left it. They would think that their friends are still around, waiting for them. They would think their loved ones live on, unchallenged by time, unchanged. They would picture the walls the same colour and their articles left where they had last placed them. But when they find nothing but a silent, empty house tarnished and worn by time with their loved ones passed away and their friends diminished and settled into a different life so that they wouldn’t even recognize them anymore it leaves them with a dread so heavy that they cannot lift their eyes to see anything new as the sense of loss is so profound.

You see, the hardened task of time is to show us the truth and it hurts to see it. People build lives in their head, perceptions. None of it is real and this is the one thing that I am trying to teach you now. You have to let go. You must. Don’t ever forget that things will move on without you.

You can look back but you cannot go back and for some that is the greatest heartbreak that there is so people choose not to move on but to stagnate and linger within some period of the past and through this they become ghosts. Well, look around, Bryson, there are ghosts all around us. So which are you, are you a ghost or are you a fighter? You are not important just because you were born, no, you have to make yourself matter. You want to be remembered? You want to see what it looks like from the top of the mountain? Then you’re going to have to forget about the pain and about the past and fight for it with all you’ve got just like you have to fight for everything in this life.”

-Excerpt from chapter 3 of: