There was an empty car on the running path when I got to the park. It was still dark out, around 5:45 in the morning. The car was old and gray and had a sadness to it. It's possible that I added the sadness later, but it doesn't matter, because one of the things that I learned later is that the sadness was already there.

People do this sometimes, drive onto the running path. Cars and motorcycles both. They don’t usually park there. But still. I find it irritating. I found it irritating that morning, too. I looked around to see if I could spot the driver of the car, to see if I could understand their actions and, in doing so, perhaps become less irritated. Alas, I spotted no one and understood nothing.

Five. That's how many times I must have run past his body without knowing it. It wasn't until after I'd finished running and started stretching that the next piece of the puzzle, which I still didn't understand to be a puzzle, came into focus. I heard another car turning left onto the path behind me. When I turned to look at it I saw that it was actually an ambulance. Lights on. Sirens off. It drove away from me, toward the southern edge of the lake, near the floating dock. I couldn't tell what had happened, but a small group of people were gathered there, and like I said, an ambulance had already arrived, so I left it alone, finished stretching, went home.

I told my wife about the ambulance, said I'm sure one of the runners who speak my language would fill me in on the details whenever I saw them next. She nodded along then checked a local online group to see if anyone had posted about what had happened. They had, and in a fair amount of detail. At around 7:15 that morning, someone reported the discovery of a body. Before it was a body it had been a man. A former solder in his late seventies who used to frequent the park, greeting the other runners and walkers, feeding snacks to the dogs, and once upon a time running there himself. Until some unspecified disease all but took his legs from him and he took instead to walking the best he could. Until even walking became a chore. Until ... In an order and manner that I can't fully know: He wrote a note apologizing to his family for his "misbehavior," and instructing them to use the money that he'd borrowed to pay for his funeral. He drove his old gray car full of sadness to the park and left it sitting on the running path. Then he walked with great effort to the dock, possibly stopping at one of the spirit houses along the way, and from atop it he held a revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

The man who posted about this included several photos. One of the man’s note. Another of an emergency vehicle and onlookers. Another showing the taped-off entrance to the dock and the man's family members sitting on the curb in front of it, in what I can only presume to be very bad shape. The poster at least had the decency to blur their faces. His accounting of events included a detail about a white dog that the man used to feed and that someone saw sniffing the body. I know the white dog well and saw it several times that morning. What I think haunts me so much about this particular detail, beyond the obvious incongruity, is the same thing that haunts me about all of the particular details: they are all hyper-familiar aspects of my morning routine, details that had until that morning existed to me only through direct experience and without any particular narrative structure but for the one(s) I might have formed in my mind. It is as though I woke up one morning, went to the kitchen, made some coffee, went to the office, turned on the computer, and found a report of some tragedy that had occurred near my coffee maker just moments ago, with details about and photos of the otherwise mundane kitchen ecosystem that surrounds it. Yes, the park is public and my home is private. And yes, I'm aware that I am not the only human in existence and that there are billions of us having direct experiences among billions of others who are having their own direct experiences, every day. But that knowledge does not erase the line between what feels private and familiar to us and what is in fact public—and in so being, always to some degree unfamiliar—to us. The only thing explicitly, experientially unfamiliar to me in this whole story is the man himself. I can't place him for the life of me. Excluding a few forced breaks, I've been going to that park at least five mornings a week for over two years now, and whoever this man was, he was effectively already a ghost to me. How invisible was he? Even on the morning that he ended his life, I was right there, and I still didn't see him.

When you live in a foreign country and don't make a strong enough effort to learn the language, you exist largely outside of life. Another way to say that is that you exist mostly inside yourself; that is where your life plays out. (To be clear, this was part of the initial appeal when I began traveling and living outside of the US—I wanted to be faraway, off on my own, looking into the world and at its inhabitants without any obligation to partake in their social rituals; it's still part of the appeal, actually; it's only in the past few years that I've begun to recognize this desire as something that I should probably—to an extent—resist more than nurture.) I know a lot of details about what happened. But there are many details I don't know. Some of the connective tissue in the events I've described is the conjectural stuff of my own making. That's how we make sense of the things we experience. Through narratives. Narratives that we can't help but make personal. Narratives that we can't help but stitch together internally. Stories. That's what our memories are made of, and that’s what they form. An infinite mess of more stories. Most of which we wrote without even realizing it. Stories based on stories based on stories. Some of them fictions. Most of them debatable. All of them saved to innately fallible internal storage systems. It's possible that the car I saw wasn't even his, but I don't believe that. It's possible that he killed himself after I got to the park, not before, but wouldn't I have heard a gunshot? It had to have been before, right? It's possible that he hadn't even been to the park in the last two years, and that's why I can't place him, but the memories I've begun to form of the story I'm writing now already include him—in nebulous, composite form—struggling to walk as people like me run by him, oblivious to his struggles, irritated about trivial things, delighted about equally trivial things, looking forward to coffee, bracing ourselves for the mundane brutality of the day ahead, absorbed in the valleys of our minds, immersed in the pure joy of simply running outside, ignorant to the gratitude we should be feeling for simply still having legs. How long will it be before I find myself telling someone this story, having all but forgotten the yawning gap between memory and reality?

It is late Saturday morning as I type this. The events I’ve described all happened on Tuesday morning. I've been back to the park every morning since. The first day I saw maybe two dozen little white flags stuck in the soil in front of the dock, which, as I understand it, are part of a ritual meant to guide the spirit along on its path to being reborn. In the center of the dock, there was a somewhat large puddle that I assume was a still-drying remnant of the cleanup job. I walked past the dock for the first time, during my warmup loop, with another man at my side. I'd never seen or spoken with him before, and I didn't really speak with him much that day either. He doesn't speak my language, and when I told him that I don't speak his, he didn't seem to care. He kept talking anyway and I kept going along with it. Nodding my head. Raising my eyebrows. Saying things like "Ah." When we got to the dock he pointed to it and said something I didn’t understand. "Khao jai," I said in his language. I understand.

The puddle is now long gone. As of this morning, the flags are gone, too. The white dog is still there doing its thing. All the park dogs are still there doing their things. The weekend market opened today as usual, and by 8am or so it was in full swing. Food. Coffee. Music. Families. Friends. Walkers. Runners. Cyclists. The still-tolerable morning sun. The still-merciful morning shade. The pond and the swans and the lake. I keep thinking about the man—my conjectured narrative of him, that is—on my runs, but it's happening less and less by the day. My wife has told me that she doesn't want to go to the park because of ghosts. I am not at all bothered by this prospect, though. In part because, insofar as ghosts exist, then where in the world would they not already be, and why in the world would I not wish to commune with them? There is absolutely nothing more interesting about life than death.

In the week or two before the man killed himself, I'd started training my attention while running on (my vague understanding of) biosemiosis, by which I mean—please bear with me—I'd been trying to open my attention up to the exchange of symbols and signs among the living organisms and systems surrounding me. One of the reasons I'd started doing this was that my mind kept returning to things that I didn't want it to keep returning to. Fruitless things like the past and my useless collection of regrets about it, and the future and my pointless collection of anxieties about it, and the work I do and my poisonous collection of grievances about it, and so on. Distractions, all of them, from what is arguably the only entirely nonfictional moment of any of our lives: this one, the present one, the one for me right now where I am observing my mind guide my fingers to make the symbols and signs that make language and meaning, the one where I am turning fallible internal narratives into fallible external memories charged with curiosity and inquiry and conveyance.

My runs do a lot of things for me, but one of the big ones is that they allow me to commune with both nature and my own suffering first thing in the morning, when the strange stuff inside my skull is at its most supple and mystical. And one of the joys and rewards of choosing to suffer through a run is that the suffering eventually recedes, drifting out of consciousness before swinging back and blossoming into feelings of euphoria and greater mental acuity. So, ridiculous and impossible though it may seem, why not try to harness that acuity and apply it to my intentions to both (1) be more present with my suffering and its rewards and (2) be more in tune with nature? And anyway, I'm not convinced that it is so far-fetched. Are we not a part of nature, too? Are we not participants in the same system? Are we not already senders and receivers of abstract symbolic thought? My initial attempts to observe the signals sent between, say, soil and birds and leaves were not, you might be surprised to learn, very successful. Not really. But they were not entirely unsuccessful either. They did make me more present, within myself and within my surroundings, and it's still early days; in a few years or months, or maybe even weeks, perhaps I'll be able to better observe, on some intuitive level, the sign processes of fungi and algae, not to mention those of my fellow invisible men and women. And while I realize that what I'm about to express will break the bounds of biosemiosis as such (though not of semiosis more broadly), maybe becoming more receptive to the signaling of nature and Homo sapiens will in turn make me more receptive to “ghosts.” If not in the more literal sense ("an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image”), then perhaps in the more symbolic sense ("a faint trace of something”). In our age of overstimulation, there is perhaps nothing that I would be happier to receive than a faint trace of something.

People sometimes tell me that I've become too negative, that I should be more grateful. The former might be true, but I don’t think it actually affects the latter in any meaningful sense. I am very grateful. For a lot of things. Yes, I have acquired negative views of some things over the years, maybe even a lot of them, but those are my honest, hard-earned views, the result of mustering all the receptivity I could muster, and I am not going to dress them up up as something less honest for anyone's sake, including my own. My thoughts may lean toward the fantastical sometimes, but it is always in an effort to hack deeper into reality. Not the superficial thing that we call reality so we can cover our eyes with its flaccid comforts and carry on. No. That is the reality that I pine and burn to breach. If you are grateful for it, then good, great, be grateful for it. But I don’t think our goal here should be to pretend. There's enough hollow positivity in the world already. And, well, respectfully, you're not going to find me adding to it anytime soon. Again, though, I am not ungrateful. I am actively grateful, in fact. I just don't often feel the desire to express my gratitude, as it is not often clawing at me to get out, like some of my more negative views tend to do. If that is the criticism, that I should make a greater effort to focus on and express my feelings of gratitude more, then fair enough. But I maintain my position that expressing gratitude for the things I am grateful for will not turn my negative views into positive ones. That’s not how it works. They are all in the cauldron together. In any case, today I am going to make an exception, but only because there genuinely are a few points of gratitude in me that I can feel yearning to reach outward. They are as follows: I am grateful that I didn't see the body or the gunshot wound. I am grateful that I didn't see the white dog poking around in any of it. And I am grateful beyond words that I still have my legs.