The Only Choice
Esther sits on the cloud blanket, waiting in front of Lucy’s gate like she always does.
Every night, she has sat with the prone form of Lucy in her dreams. Missing when Lucy was awake to kiss her, swim with her, fuck her until they were both too spent to think, and pretend not to laugh at Esther’s bad jokes.
Purple glitter grass waves in the breeze.
Shimmering bubbles in the river float to burst into the aurora smearing the sky.
Lucy’s gate stays closed. Like it has every other night for the past year.
Her body, in repose on the cloud blanket in front of Esther, doesn’t stir.
But Esther is determined, and spitefully hopeful. She opens the cemetery gate wide and waits.
Nothing happens. It’s eerily silent on the other side, only grass waving in the breeze.
Leaving the gate open, Esther treks to the other set of doors that make her feel uneasy. To Esther’s surprise, the cloud splits in two; the part bearing Lucy’s body stays put. The smaller part that broke away follows at her heels, trying to herd her back to the other gates.
“Sorry, cloud-friend,” Esther pats it fondly as she walks around it. “You don’t have to follow me. I won’t go in, unless I have to.”
The cloud bumps against her legs, nudging her away from the uncanny doors. It must regret letting Lucy run through the wrong gate, if it’s trying this hard to keep her from doing the same.
Unswayed, Esther cracks open the iron gate where she last saw Lucy running through in their last dream together. Unable to overcome the dread enough to step through it, she simply listens. A man shouts. A woman screams back at him. A child’s nasally singsong taunts someone beyond the gate.
Esther waits a little longer, but there is no hint of Lucy’s sonorous voice in anything she hears. With an annoyed huff, she slowly closes the gate with a creak.
Just a few feet away, her own uncanny door is even more sickening in its dreadfulness.
She stands in front of it, building her courage.
When she can’t bring herself to open it, Esther instead presses her ear to it.
The screaming laughter of her younger brother and sisters echoes through the crack and brings a wistful smile to her face.
The temptation to open it, to see if her siblings are there, is almost enough to override her intuitive unease.
But then comes her mother’s tearful prayers to fix her, followed by her father’s disappointed sigh before he tells her that he loves her, but not her sin, and hopes that she comes to her senses one day.
Esther pulls away from her unpleasant door, leaving it unopened, before trudging back to Lucy’s body on the cloud blanket.
Sitting in her spot next to Lucy’s body, the cloud reunites with itself with a relieved shimmy.
Esther looks at her pleasant closet door, decorated in the fairy and unicorn stickers she’d bought with her allowance when she was a kid.
Unlike the uncanny door, the idea of opening this door feels like a cozy blanket and cup of tea on a rainy day. Or her first kiss with a woman.
Or the first time she met Lucy.
“Why not?” Esther shrugs. She opens her own door for good measure, fighting to stay upright as it tries to pull her in.
Nothing happens.
Leaving her closet door open, she resists the tug to go through it and back to her waking life.
Instead, she sits on the cloud blanket and waits for the impossible, stroking Lucy’s blazing hot forehead.
Strange, how warm her body is in their dreamland, when her touch is ice in the real world.
Maybe Lucy’s dad was right, and her real body is trapped here in this plane, and her dream self is in the real world.
In Esther’s world.
“Lucy? Can you hear me?” Esther gently shakes her shoulder, knowing from experience it will do nothing, not even rock her in the slightest. But damn if she won’t try again. “Please wake up. I miss you. Please come back to me.”
She waits.
As she should have expected, nothing happens.
With every passing second lengthening into an eternity, Esther’s hope falters. How would one even put an anchor back where it belongs, when the rope is who knows where? She’s tried to move Lucy’s body, to no avail. Even if she could, what if it makes matters worse, and she loses Lucy forever?
Her stubborn hope breaks at the possibility.
No hell would be worse than being alone again.
Losing Lucy now, after everything…it’d cut deeper than the strange man answering her parent’s phone number.
Hurt worse than endless weeks of overwhelming work, while grieving what could have been and longing for what was supposed to be.
Ache more endlessly than the front door of her childhood home closing in her face, left with only her school bag and the clothes on her back.
The iron will that has persevered through everything life has thrown at Esther falls back to the one true coping mechanism that has never failed her: appreciating what she has.
“At least I have something. Even if she’s no longer in my dreams. Even if I’ll never actually see her again, I get to talk to her during the day.
That has to be enough.” Esther falls back onto the cloud blanket next to Lucy with a sigh, admiring the light of the aurora shimmering aqua across the sky through the tears blurring her vision.
Tears Lucy would gently brush away in their dreams, the way she does now as a ghost. The way Lucy never did in real life.
The way she never would.
“Who am I kidding?” Esther’s voice cracks as she rolls into her side, burying her face in Lucy’s neck.
“You’re right. This isn’t enough.” As much as Esther loves each whisper of Lucy in her heart, each glimpse of her, each cool touch, it comes with a price.
That tug of emotions in her chest doesn’t belong to her.
Those brief glimpses in the mirror, or a flicker of candlelight, are poignant reminders that Lucy is beyond her reach.
Holding Lucy’s hand fills Esther with guilt, because it causes Lucy pain, even as it brings Esther comfort.
“Maybe I should try what she did, and go through my other door?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.” A soothing voice from behind makes Esther jump. “It’s just your past. From what you’ve told me, I’d skip it if I were you.”
Esther whirls around to see Lucy leaning in the door frame of the bifold closet door.
Her long legs cross at her thin ankles as she takes a tentative step into the grass.
Purple glitter coats the white chemise that dissolves into wisps at the hems. Lucy grips the door frame with her elegant hands, steadying herself with a smile.
“You’re here!” Esther’s eyes burn as she chokes on her heart beating in her throat. The body that had been lying in repose on the cloud blanket for a year has vanished. “How is this possible?”
Lucy shrugs with a wet laugh. “Fuck if I know anything at this point. I’ve been wrong about everything this whole time. All my shit-talking about theosophists, and I’m just as bad as them. Why the hell am I coming out of your door anyway?”
“I tried opening it today.” Esther laughs. “Though my door opens every time I come in and leave. It can’t be that simple.” She holds out her hands in invitation. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you here.”
Lacing their fingers together, Lucy’s face softens in awe. She takes a tentative step onto the cloud blanket. “I missed you.”
“I missed you more.” Esther pulls Lucy down to her knees, wrapping her hand around Lucy’s swan neck to draw her into a kiss.
They sigh together in overdue gratification at the first press of their lips.
At the first taste of each other, they’re falling into the blanket like they did that first dream.
The comfortable warmth of each other’s touch is a balm after a year of pain and isolation.
The cloud blanket surrounds them, seemingly happy they’re both there again, that Lucy is awake. It has been just as mopey as Esther over the past year, barely moving as if bearing Lucy’s body like an honor guard.
Eventually, Lucy pulls away, kisses peppering Esther’s cheeks and forehead. Her smile turns wistful, regretful. Esther’s heart sinks from the dread of what Lucy is about to say. Here, she may not be able to feel Lucy in her chest, but Lucy’s hesitation is written all over her face.
“I have to go back through my gate.” Lucy looks at the wrought iron and stone door with foreboding, tightening her arms around Esther.
The cloud blanket gathers them tight.
Esther leans into the comfort from both of them.
Lucy said exactly what Esther knew she would.
“But what happens if you do? What if you…you know, move on?” Esther chews her lower lip, brow furrowing and heart breaking; she just got Lucy back, and she already wants to leave? “What if I lose you again?”
“Then I move on. And you move on, Esther. And you find more people to bring you happiness.” Lucy rubs a thumb across Esther’s lip, pulling it from between her teeth with a soft smile.
“But I spent the last year living as a specter in your life. That isn’t fair to either of us.
I have to live—or maybe not live—my own life. And you have to live yours.”
“I don’t want to lose you. I’m scared.”
“Me too. I love you. So much.” Lucy’s gaze roams across Esther’s face, as if memorizing how it looks when Esther says she loves her in return.
“But I have to do this for both of us. I don’t want us to lose each other, but I want you to be happy.
I don’t know if we’ll ever be truly happy with me haunting you.
” Lucy gives her a watery smile. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll wake up hungover on my couch, and the past year will have all been a dream? ”
“If that happens, talk to me. Please,” Esther whispers.
As much as it would hurt to lose her, Esther would survive, heal, grow stronger, carry Lucy with her forever.
Like she has overcome every challenge in life before this.
She’s lost her family and lived, overcome her friends forgetting about her.
It would ache endlessly to wake up alone, to never hear Lucy’s voice again, never feel that comforting bloom of love in her chest. But if she ends up alone, Esther is determined to thrive, in honor of Lucy.
“I won’t keep you here with me if you need to move on, but going back to life without you is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. ”
Lucy nods and leans forward once again, resting her forehead against Esther’s.
“I want to stay. Please don’t feel like I want to leave you, because I want more time with you—the rest of our lives together—but this isn’t a life.
” Pulling her into a hug, Lucy presses a kiss to the tattoo behind Esther’s ear.
“Haunting you has been Hell as much as Heaven. For both of us.”
With an understanding nod, Esther buries her face into Lucy’s neck, trailing her lips up along her jaw and into a desperate kiss that needs to last forever.
Lucy indulges her, kissing her back gently. “Thank you for everything, East.” Then she stands, pats the cloud blanket fondly, and steps through her gate.