Odd story with an odd origin...

[vvav]

I was bored and was looking around Yahoo! Answers for some reason, when I saw a question asking "Has anyone met a spirit or demon? Please describe in detail." I decided to make up a story for it and had quite a bit of fun with it, but I go to post it and the question's been deleted! So you guys get it instead, 'cause I don't want it to go to waste.



I was simply combing my hair a few minutes after getting out of the shower, and I felt a cold spot on my shin even with the heater on right next to me. There was no one else in the house at the time and I hadn't heard a door open, so I was a little freaked out, wondering how such cold air had gotten into the house; this didn't feel like just a slight draft as heavy cold air moved in from outside the bathroom to replace the hot air inside it, but rather a sort of chill, no air movement that I could feel, but a feeling of a cold spot slowly passing over my shin and then calf. I tried to trace the direction it felt that the "draft" appeared to come from, and it just led to a corner formed by two inside walls, making it impossible for it to have been a case of bad insulation.
At this point, I was pretty nervous. Goosebumps had crawled up my arms and legs, and I was in a slight panic, looking around for some overlooked solution so I could laugh at myself and get back to my hair, but it never came. I got up and investigated the corner, moving my hand around to try and feel it again, but I couldn't. It only seemed to happen when I was sitting there a few feet away from the corner where I had originally been seated. I sat there again and experimented, feeling in between the corner and my leg when I felt the cold again, but there was nothing there, as if it was a self-contained pocket of air that refused to submit to the imbalance of heat in the room.
I soon found that the cold had moved further up my leg without my noticing, now resting just above my knee, actually inside my shorts so that it couldn't possibly be coming from an outside source unless it was blowing directly parallel with my leg, a path obviously blocked by a rather important organ we call our foot. It continued its path upwards, following my thigh, hip, and then torso upwards on a path that clearly seemed to be headed directly for my head, and I just sat there in amazement, trying to wrap my head around the phenomenon.
It reached my neck roughly ten minutes after I first felt it, and I grew increasingly lightheaded as it drew closer to my head and then I started to feel that it was actually wrapping itself around my head. My vision blurred, all external sounds had been put on mute, and I wasn't even really aware that a world outside of this bubble existed. My face felt chilled, like I had just come in from a windy December day, but it wasn't at all unpleasant and my teeth didn't chatter. I felt incredibly intimate with this "pocket of air", though it now seemed offensive to think of it that way.
I felt as if it was an intelligent presence, and we talked in a way, not as if our minds were entirely bared, but as if our feelings and uppermost thoughts were linked. I felt her story, not like a typical narrative, but rather a story told in emotions and vague pictures, the kind formed in the mind's eye, where a slight part can become clear if you focus on it, but if you just try to look at it as a whole it all seems like a blur. She told me of her childhood in a crowded apartment building, her entire family living in one room in the first half of the 20th century, at first fairly comfortable, her family made up of her parents and two other siblings that got along better than most and without any sort of luxury but also without any trouble paying the bills from month to month.
But later, trouble did come. She didn't know why it had started, but her parents never seemed to enjoy anything anymore, and instead were always fighting with each other over increasingly petty things. I imagine this was because they didn't have any modern luxuries like TV to take their minds off things, so when they weren't at work, their only choice to occupy themselves was to talk with and subsequently bother each other. This negative attitude was, some would say inevitably, transferred to her siblings, who had previously been so kind but now seemed incredibly malicious, and even to herself. She could tell even while it was happening that it was, and this was even scarier than the incredible quarrels that kept her up, since she was literally less than ten feet away from her squabbling parents at best, and the change in herself was truly the scariest thing.
She soon adopted the rude vocabulary that she had become accustomed to, and even stole when she became overly envious, justifying it by assuring herself that such people would never miss such a small fraction of their wealth anyway. She had realized long ago that her family was poor, and they had become much more so over the years, leaving her feeling incredibly bitter, wondering why they "deserved" such things more than she did, and she eventually followed this to the logical conclusion: that she was somehow inferior. She had previously led a very devout existence, but she had convinced herself that she would never be good enough for heaven anyway, so she figured she might as well not restrict herself anymore.
Her teen years were spent in a dull stupor, just trying to get through each day, so she never really accomplished anything in those years. After that, the story speeds up, and I see her as a prostitute for several years, a factory worker for more than 20, and then finally as the sole laborer on a small farm she had saved up and bought for herself. Her one dream in life had become to work solely for her own benefit after seeing the fruits of her labor endlessly passed on to someone else, someone more "deserving". Here she lived a meager existence, avoiding social contact as much as possible because it simply depressed her when she tried to compare her worth to others' and always lost out.
I have always wondered why the story sped up after her youth, giving less than a third of the time to over 80% of her life, and the only conclusion that really satisfies me is that she simply wasn't really living anymore, a sort of ghost before she died. She continued "living" in a way after her physical body stopped, since she had not really lived all the time allocated to her, and though this existence was a poor substitute, it was at least another chance to cherish life, a gift given to her, though by who even she did not know.
I'm sure I told her of my existence in the same way that she told me of hers, but the information passed so easily in this incredible, almost meditative, state that I can't recall what I told her, how I described it, or even what she thought of the way I had lived my life, but somehow I felt at ease, having finally revealed my entire being, unreserved, to another.
The feeling of sharing left me almost instantaneously. I could still feel her presence next to me, emitting a soft glow of happiness, and then it moved away from me, slowly and then faster, and I felt a slight twinge of sadness, though whether it was my own or the last thing transmitted from her I will never know, as we wordlessly said goodbye.



Comments and criticism certainly welcome. I'm aware the writing style changes pretty dramatically from the beginning to the end. Only proofread once, and I tend toward a lot of mistakes when it's too long to proofread 4 or 5 times before I post it.