Three
The worst part about being a ghost is how long the nights are.
I’ve been dead for a week. I know this. I know I know this, because today was Friday.
Friday. Friday. Or was yesterday Friday?
Either way, when the sun rises—“Will it rise? How do I know that?”—it will be Saturday.
It’s been one week since I died, and every night has been an eternity long enough for me to lose myself.
The sun set approximately sixty million years ago, and Saturday has not yet brightened the window. Esther is curled up on her side, snoring softly. I pace in circles around her bed, talking to myself as I float around her. How do I know her name, this woman buried in blankets and darkness?
I’ve been very careful to keep track of the days.
All of my careful voice notes—“What are voice notes? Is talking to myself a voice note? Is that why I can’t shut up?
”—that I’ve taken every day vanish from my memory each night; I need to have some semblance of awareness, some way to feel in control, even as everything slips through my fingers with each passing hour.
Knowing what day it is is all I manage to keep, once the sun goes down and Esther clicks off the light.
I wouldn’t have bothered with something so unimportant, but the first night lasted for decades.
I was stark raving mad by the time Esther’s alarm went off and her singsong “Good morning!” to herself put me out of my misery.
For someone so used to being alone, I hate when Esther sleeps. The sixteen or so hours that Esther is awake go by in the blink of an eye, and the eight hours she’s asleep crawl by painfully slow.
“Like I’m the ghost of Rip van Winkle’s wife, slowly dying as I wait for her to wake up again.” I shake my head, wondering why I can remember a silly folk tale when I can’t even remember my own name. “Except unlike Mrs. Van Winkle, I’m already dead!”
I pause. “How do I know that? That I’m dead?” I hold out my hands, seeing only dense gray smoke in the dark, wisps that seem to glow and dance as I move my fingers. “Oh, right. Ghost. Haunting Esther. I’m documenting what being a ghost is like. It’s Friday.”
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a week, when each night feels like an eternity. There’s no escape, no distraction from my waiting. In an attempt to retain my sanity, I lecture to no one about my observations, form hypotheses, and synthesize my data.
“I’m Dr. Lucy Monae. I’m dead, but I was a professor,” I tell myself; I’ll need the reminder again soon.
“I’m collecting primary source data on metaphysics.
” All for naught, because in the dark, everything I know to be true slips away like water between my fingers.
As an academic who specializes—“Ugh, specialized,” I correct myself—in philosophical conceptualizations of the afterlife, being a ghost is a unique and unprecedented opportunity for field research.
If I ever find a way to communicate with Esther, or track any of this, I would become the leading authority, a foundational primary source for the field.
“If anyone believed her anyway. Doubtful.” I sigh, because even communicating with her is impossible.
“Time, for example, moves unexpectedly in death, but not as weird as I thought it would. I hypothesized that everything would kind of overlap and skip around, seeing as time is a human construct. Everything happens all at the same time, and our brains process it into a logical sequential order so we can understand it.” I huff, pacing as I lecture.
“And since I’m a damn ghost now, I no longer have a brain to process the Everythingness and Everywhenness into a logical order.
I should be experiencing chaos.” I laugh at myself, the sound strangely muted.
“Those aren’t even real words, Dr. Monae.
No respectable journal would publish that. ”
Esther murmurs in her sleep, and I snap to her side, anticipation thrumming through me.
The sound chimes through the quiet the way I expect my voice to, yet never does.
Her sleep talk is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
I float over the bed to smile down at her, wondering if she’s going to wake up, needing her to.
But the sleep talk fades, and her soft snores resume.
“‘Should’ being the operative word here. I should be experiencing chaos. But short-term memory loss isn’t exactly chaotic.
Just annoying,” I mutter as I roll onto my back midair, returning to my lecture.
“Despite my lack of corporeal body, everything is logical. Trying to keep track of any of it is hard as shit, but it is undeniably chronological, even if the chronology isn’t evenly spaced.
” It’s like my ghostly not-brain has ADHD, and my special interest is Dr. Voigt.
I can’t focus on anything except Esther; remembering anything outside of what she’s doing at the exact moment is a challenge.
Even now, as I’m trying to stare at the ceiling, my not-body keeps rotating back around so I’m facing her again.
It takes concerted effort to look away.
How ghosts can be aware of anything is something I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around. Cogito ergo sum and all that, but how do I cogito without a physical brain?
“And yet, cogito. Ergo sum. Or would it be Cogitavi ergo eram? Are my actions now in past tense if I’m dead?
” I spin in circles above and around Esther.
“Or am I capable of thought and processing time because I’m somehow using Esther’s brain?
But how, if I’m not in her head? How could my consciousness be using her brain, if I’m not in her physical body?
” I pause, and float back down to the duvet next to Esther.
If I must look at her, at least I can pretend I’m lying in bed with her.
The dim of night makes the pink cotton just as gray as my skin, my form a faint line marring the darkness.
Did dying erase my capacity for rational thought? Why is this so hard to figure out?
“My current hypothesis for why nights are so hard is that Esther is offline, deep in her circadian rhythm, instead of helping me think. Her brain is busy turning experience into memory, and readying itself for the next day of life.”
That’s also the only explanation I’ve been able to think up as to why the fuck I’ve been talking so damn much!
I have always been a very quiet person, going for days without a single sound, unless I was playing the role of competent academic and professor.
I was never that competent, but at least I knew what people wanted to hear from Dr. Monae.
But since dying, I can’t shut up. All of the poems and soliloquies, social scripts and presentations I’d memorized in life flow out of my mouth as easy as breathing.
So, I must have a ghost-brain. It just can’t store anything new, only what I already know.
Unless Esther also has a photographic memory and is a secret fangirl of Poe, because I can still recite the Tell Tale Heart with no hesitation.
“I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” I curl my legs to my chest midair, reminded suddenly of my mother’s eyes.
Her watery blue eyes that I could never bear to look at.
“Though, you have blue eyes, too, Esther. Your eyes are so pretty. I wish you’d open them. ”
“Open your eyes,” Esther mumbles in her sleep. Just as soft and lilting as her voice is in the waking world, Esther’s murmurs are a nightly serenade.
In my forever-night induced delusions, I smile, imagining she’s talking to me. “My eyes are open. Yours are closed.” I sigh. “I wish you could see me. Hear me. Know me.”
My breath catches in my throat. I’ve never felt so much like my mother as I have in death. Limerence is a powerful drug, an intrusive obsessive melancholy that plagued her in life. Now it plagues me. “I wish you could see me,” I repeat, quieter this time. “Open your eyes.”
When Esther is awake, I have something to listen to because she talks constantly, narrating her life like she’s filming her own documentary.
When she first awakens, when I’m at my weakest, I even reply, adding commentary that she’ll never hear, asking questions she’ll never answer, and sharing my thoughts on all of the endless rhetorical questions she doesn’t expect anyone to respond to.
Another sixty billion years pass as I slowly circle Esther’s sleeping form, floating around her as if pacing in circles.
Over and over, I talk to myself, reminding myself that it’s Friday night, and tomorrow is Saturday.
It’s been one week. A new to-do list in my journal that my chronic procrastination will inevitably make useless.
Dawn is Saturday. Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday.
Until finally, the pervasive darkness lifts slightly with the promise of dawn on the horizon. I can see the outline of Esther’s form under her duvet, the soft pink color slightly less muted in the low light.
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Esther is the sun.” I laugh at myself, the unpracticed sound raw and hoarse in my throat.
Of all the poetry and prose I burned into my brain from sheer loneliness, Romeo and Juliet is my least favorite.
They were far too hormonal to be realistic.
And yet, I can’t stop myself. “Arise, fair sun, arise, arise, arise and kill the envious moon—” I pause, frowning.
“No, I’m already dead. Put the envious moon out of her misery and wake the fuck up.
For she is already sick and pale with death, and she just wants to hear your voice. ”
Esther rolls over in her sleep. “Wake up. Please wake up.”
Reassuring warmth fills me as her soft, sleep-filled voice rasps quietly in the pre-dawn light.
I float closer from where I’ve been keeping vigil above the bed, feeling more human, more myself, with every syllable her perfect lips form.
Only another eternity until I can remember who I am again.
“It is my lady. Oh, it is my love. Oh, that she knew she were! She speaks, yet she says—”
Esther murmurs again in her sleep, and in my delusion, I’m convinced I hear, “Please come back to me.”
“If only I could, fair sun, fair Esther, fair East.” My choked laugh sounds more like a sob. “I am too bold. ‘Tis not to me she speaks. I was never hers to return to her.”
I float alongside her, cross legged over the covers, as her eyelids flicker in the faint glow from the window. She burrows into her pillow, wiping her face with the back of her hand. I think for a moment she’s about to wake.
But Esther simply snores, and I am inexplicably saddened. I wish I could cry to ease the ache in my heart, the loneliness gnawing at me. But ghost eyes do not burn, they do not water. The tears never come.
As Esther rolls onto her side, I reach for her, one fingertip burning as I brush her slackened jaw. The searing pain is a reminder that we’re both here, even if she doesn’t know I’m here; I can’t reach her no matter how hard I press into the burn. I’m alone, and she’s alone. We’re alone together.
“Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek!” I trace my finger along her round face and over her pouty lower lip, wishing I could feel anything besides the searing pain in my fingertip. Wishing she could feel my pain, too—
A piercing ring makes both of us flinch.
Smacking the snooze button on her phone, the East awakens, and with it comes the peal of morning bells, the sunshine of that sweet, soft voice greeting me with a “Good morning!”
She says it to no one but herself, but the tintinnabulation is my saving grace, my raison d’être, my lifeline to what little sanity I still possess after eight hours of a few murmurs that escaped her dreams to keep me company.
“Oh, maybe she’ll be back today! It’s Friday!” Esther leaps out of bed with far more energy than I’d ever mustered for anything.
“It’s Friday? Fuck! I thought it was supposed to be Saturday!
” I got my count wrong somewhere. Discouraging, and yet I can’t bring myself to care; I am so relieved to have Esther awake again, even if she is talking about some other unnamed she.
I roll my eyes at the twinge of jealousy.
“Ugh, really? You’re literally dead. You never had a chance, and now you’re really never gonna have a chance! You never wanted a chance!”
Esther busies herself making coffee, peeking out the window as daybreak spills into the alley outside. Only a few minutes into the day, and already time speeds up, as if Esther is a recording being played in double time.
I wait until she sits at the table, before risking a peek out the window myself. Looking away from Esther and focusing my gaze on something beyond her immediate vicinity takes so much willpower, but my interest is piqued.
She’s looked out that window several times this week, but she’s never commented on what she’s looking at, or rather what she’s looking for—this mysterious she, apparently. She was the first thing on Esther’s mind when she woke up, and she seems to be all Esther can think about today.
I pretend my ridiculous jealousy is mere curiosity, as an excuse to look out the window.
It seems so silly; I’ve been here for a week—over a week—and yet, my only observation of the world outside Esther’s window is the brick wall of the building next door, and the changing light throughout the day until the sun disappears from the alley.
Taking a grounding breath to focus my attention on anything but Esther, I turn around, forcing myself to focus on that nondescript brick wall, to see what has captured her continued interest.
The view from Esther’s apartment makes my jaw drop.
In the windowsill across the alley sits a purple oxalis, with bobbing purple leaves and graceful pink flowers. Its terracotta pot is unremarkable, but I’d recognize that plant anywhere.
Because that’s my purple oxalis.