🌻?
A person who falls into a black hole would not actually slow to a stop before the event horizon. They would only appear to do that to an outside observer, because of the way light and time on that threshold work - from the person's point of view, they would just continue to fall in and die. I feel like this could create an interesting type of ghost. Normally ghosts are said to be bound to a piece of unfinished business or to an object or location that they had a connection with in life, but what if the unfinished business is someone else's perception of them? Could a spirit crawl its way out of a gravity well to meet the image an observer sees them as, hauling its way along that thin rope until it's rejoined with someone else's erroneous assumption that it is still alive? Could it take that assumption and wear it as a cloak, like a camoflauge from the reality of its death by crushing force? Could it get close enough to the mind that stores its image to speak? I hope it could. I'd like to think it could.
I'm not sure if they'd still be themself, if the only thing keeping them alive was that image of impossible tenacity and ethereal persistence that someone else formed of them while looking at that less than a second of lingering light that appeared to hold still against the dark. Maybe that person didn't even know them in life. Maybe they did, but knew them wrong. Maybe in the moments before that hovering afterimage fades, the ghost would look through their mind and memories and find that not everything is in the same place, that some things have been replaced with ones more convenient, more or less sharp-edged, more or less kind. I wonder if they'd care, if they'd just fallen into a black hole and died excruciatingly only to claw their way back as a thinly-veiled error in the universe to make their final thoughts known. I don't think they would. They might, if they can last beyond the observer's thoughts of them, but I don't think they'd do that, either.
I hope you're having a good day. I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse, but I'm sure it did Something to it. It did something to mine.
