Lost Soul

The beginning

Day 6027

The day before I died was an ordinary day. We were on holiday before the final term of the final year of high school.  The holidays were a relief because to say I was nervous about the future was an understatement, I was worried about passing exams and about getting into the course I wanted. Then there was leaving behind all the people I knew and going somewhere entirely different. I planned to spend my days in a combination of preparing for the final term and hanging out with friends.  I felt time speeding past me too fast to achieve everything I wanted to get done.

I guess I could tell you a little about myself to help set the scene, my name is Leanna, I'm in Year twelve and I have to make all the decisions that go along with that... like what to do with the rest of my life. I envy those people who know exactly what they want to do from the time they are small. My problem is that I have too many interests or rather two big interests. I love art and I love science and I don't want to choose between them but I have too.

My dad fused his love of Art and History and now works in the city's museum helping in preservation and making the displays that everyone comes to see. Can you fuse Art and Science? or does that make you a mad scientist. I decided that I'll go and talk to him tomorrow and try and sort it out. I had no idea that this was a momentous decision that would change the course of my life/death.

Day 0 Wednesday

The day of my death dawns hot and sunny. All the good resolutions I made at the beginning of the holidays to see this person or get that done have gradually gone out the window. It isn't so bad. I'm not so driven by ambition that I feel I have to fulfil lists like that. The only thing is now I kind of wish I had.

It's a Wednesday and I'm headed to meet my sister Isabelle in the city. These days she calls herself Belle after falling in love with vampires I guess. Honestly when my friends and I first saw Twilight as a movie we just laughed because it was so bad but Belle is younger than me and she reads more. Maybe it's better as a book?

I work at a news agency in the city and over the holidays they sometimes give me some extra time. That day there was a huge lottery draw because we were packed with people wanting to buy tickets. It makes me kind of sad because they seem so eager and the chances of winning are so small. I met Belle at the library, where else, the girl would live there if she could.

Belle and I had finished lunch and we were about to walk across the bridge to go and visit dad at the museum. I wish I could remember this exactly but it's a blur. The last thing I remember is that we were having an animated argument about the latest fictional character Belle had fallen in love with. I vaguely remember falling and a blinding flash of pain in my head and this feeling of people converging all around me as Belle shouts.

That's it, the day I died, it wasn't expected, it was an accident. I died in the middle of everything, the middle of the week, the middle of the holidays, the middle of my life. There was no boy pining beside my hospital bed. I was there fully alive and the next moment I was gone. This should surely be the end of my story but it's not, it's just the beginning.

Day 1 Thursday

The world was slow to come back into focus. It was strange like having a dizzy spell that goes through you in waves. If I had lungs I would have taken a deep breath and possibly screamed. I felt that I wanted to scream but of course I had no vocal cords and no lungs to power them. I was aware of faces around me, blurry strange faces. At first I thought that it's what had happened to me that had made them this way and then as I calmed down and realized that they were like that by themselves. They were sort of transparent, they are not people I knew but they looked kind and concerned. One of them reached out to me and held my shoulder. I didn't feel this person's touch exactly but it's like a warm steadying presence that just made me feel still and safe. The waves started to diminish and I become like a still warm ocean.

When I thought about this later I wondered if this is what it was like when I was born. That terror and strangeness of coming into being might be the same as becoming a ghost. Before focusing I imagined I was a scattered energy. The other ghosts say I was a haunt, a repeating pattern of energy with no consciousness. Sometimes it takes a while for haunts to become ghosts, sometimes they never seem to make it back. The people gathered around me were other ghosts if you haven't guessed and I'm grateful to them for attempting to bring me back. I just wish that they could tell me what happened. All I know at this moment is that my name is Leanna and I'm the ghost on the bridge. Its taking a while for my memory to come back.