Just Ghosting Around...

Nitya Vatsalya

For a second, I forgot just how dead I was. I just stood there and stared.

Ms. Vatsalya was pretty but that wasn't the reason I was so enraptured. The reason was the long scar running down her face. The scar she wore with an air of utter defiance to the world which hid its own blemishes. Without the marring, she was beautiful but with it, her hair tied back to flaunt the whole length of her pain, she was breathtaking.

I walked forward, almost in a daze, but she passed through me and with a jolt, I remembered my true position. Or lack of any position, being that I was dead.

"You know, this place isn't as dirty as I'd supposed." She said.

"Well, I did clean it-" I began but my brows furrowed. How could she be talking to me? I looked at her posture as she moved her finger through a particularly spotless length of glass.

"Weird." She paused for a second and I understood it was her self she was talking to.

Shrugging, she walked towards one of the inner bedrooms. I winced, thinking of all the dust that had collected over the time there.

A light sneeze caughts my attention and I walk towards the room, fascinated by the familiar but still so new ways of a human. Five years might be a blip in larger context but for those who lived in the tiny fissures of time, a month could be an eternity.

Days passed, and I started becoming familiar to the ways of my unaware roommate.

Her best friends were three- Jason, Derek and Jason Sr.

The first two of them were a pair of cushions on her bed and the latter a bicycle she'd moved in from the garage.

She apologized incessantly.

Whether it was to a wall she collided against a wall, or to a lifeless pair of slippers she accidently kicked.

But one thing that was the most apparent was her lack of emotions whenever her eyes caught the pictures of her deceased family.

Her clear bright eyes turned dead every time she looked at them.

Only once had a seen her cry in our days together. 

She was holding onto a school shirt, trying to muffle her gasps against the pillow. Grieving for her brother who'd died in the same accident that took her parents.

I'd left her alone for a few days after then, to avoid looking at her and face the guilt.