Here comes the ghost again

As far as he could remember, the ghosts had been around. There were three of them. One of them was always with him and looked just like him; the second was that of a monkey which perpetually clung on to his back. He could never actually see it but it kept reminding him of its presence through irritating noises and occasional scratches. The third showed no signs of its presence at all. The only way he knew about the third ghost was through the conversation between the first two. It was painfully elusive, yet the other two talked of it with reverence. Sometimes he thinks there was just one ghost, and his mental condition had tweaked his perception to impart it some sort of ghost-splitting quality which manifested three different forms of the same ghost. That theory would impart the elusive quality to all the ghosts, and nothing would remain with him, so he tried not to think that way.
Sometimes he wondered about the ghost that he was most familiar with. He realized that it had superhuman qualities when he tried to get rid of it but couldn’t. It kept running along with him and simultaneously staring him in the face even as he kept running past it. Although it was the one he knew the best, but he still didn’t really comprehend its nature, because it hardly existed at all. Its nature kept changing continuously. The fingernails of the two other ghosts kept tearing holes into his skin from both ends, and that’s when he realized that he didn’t know anything about any of them after all. This epiphany corroborated the one ghost theory in a way, although it was not meant to.
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
The ghosts had a messenger that ran very fast. He once tried running with the messenger. When he got reasonably close, the ghost by his side slowed down and fell behind him for the first time. The ghost is hard to comprehend because it’s not tangible, yet it is the only certainty, the only ultimate truth, if there ever was one.
The messenger was even more baffling in its behavior. It had the totally bizarre power of altering his perception. When he finally got close enough and almost caught up with the messenger, the three ghosts started to look more and more like one. The rules of the kingdom clearly stated that overtaking the messenger was not allowed under normal circumstances. But he wanted to find out what existed beyond the borders of this kingdom, and he could only do that by crossing the border before the messenger did. The plan was to cross the border disguised as the messenger in order to get past the guardians of the adjoining kingdom.
But there are two paths you can go by, and in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
He had heard about a cave between the mountains that formed the border between the two kingdoms. People had told him that it was very narrow and the messenger couldn’t pass through it. It was just big enough for a small child like him to pass through. Nobody on this side of the border has actually seen the cave, although some intrepid explorers who had ventured into the adjoining kingdom claimed to have found the cave’s entrance on the other side. It was hard to verify their claims, because the border is only selectively permeable, and the other kingdom denies entrance to skeptics. It’s easy to dismiss that which we haven’t seen as second cousin to Harvey the rabbit, but then can’t we say the same thing about the ghosts? Well of course we can, that is why they’re called ghosts anyway.
Epilogue
I guess the story of humanity is just a never-ending search for the cave – an endeavor to overtake the messenger and unite the ghosts.
The future of the past is eating away the past of the future.
The ghost of time present and the ghost of time future are both children of the ghost of time past. The roles may change depending on perception though.