Haunted

Time doesn't work the way it did when I was alive. The moment I'm not paying attention, days will slide by. Sometimes I have to find a newspaper or calendar to know how much life has passed since I left the physical world. Even then, I can't always decipher the letters and numbers. It's like trying to read something inside a dream. I get an impression of what I'm looking at, but if I try to focus too much on a word or character, it eludes me.

Time, space, observation, even memory--these are concepts for physical, temporal beings. I am losing the skill to keep track of them. Being dead is like suffering a steadily worsening case of dementia.

The living carry these ideas about ghosts, hazy shadows drifting spookily through graveyards, perhaps trying to deal with some "unfinished business". It is true I am at the cemetery often, lingering at the plot where my spoiled meat was buried, but only because, when someone comes to visit my stone, they sometimes talk to me. In those moments, I can almost feel alive again.

"Hi, baby."

The voice of my wife, a soft breeze through tall grasses. She always whispers when she visits my grave. She's embarrassed because she knows she might just be talking to a stone. Will it ever be possible for me to communicate to her that I'm listening?

She bends down to set a colourful spray of flowers at the base of the headstone.

"Your birthday came and went. Nan and I wondered if we should mark it in some way. We decided it would be too irreverent to have a party of some sort. Even a solemn gathering to remember you would just be too much. Like your funeral all over again. The only day worse than that was the day I got that call from the police."

I try to see her face clearly. I know she has begun to cry. I don't see her so much as I exist in her vicinity. I can make out the vague glint of tears on her cheeks, now and then.

I never know how to feel when someone cries over me. I don't want my loved ones to keep suffering, but to know I'm missed gives my existence some meaning. It assures me I was a positive force in someone's life, and therefore the too brief time I spent in my body couldn't have been a waste.

"I don't know if it's ever going to stop hurting."

Her soft voice. A bird's wings. I loved her.

"Baby... why were you taken from me? I keep trying to find the answer to that. None of it makes sense. But I know that answers aren't going to bring you back. People tell me I need to start trying to move forward... but I'm stuck. I'm in limbo."

You and me both, my love.

We are at home again. As always, I can't know how much time has passed. In the space of a blink, things leap ahead. Or perhaps they leap backward. I can't be sure time is even linear now.

My wife stands at a closed door. I can't remember which room it is. It isn't our bedroom, and I can't see inside. A study, perhaps. The place I settled down to do my reading and writing. Yes, I remember work was often an overwhelming pressure, and I often took work home with me. I needed a quiet place to get my work done. She remembers the nights I spent doing that instead of enjoying her as I ought to have been. Seeing her standing there at that door, never opening it, I have so many regrets.

She cries again as she tries to sleep. My half of the bed is empty, without even a pillow. Everything of mine has been removed. It was too much for her to bear. She remains trapped between trying to erase me from her life and trying to hold onto me. Stuck in limbo.

I cannot tell the time, but it's no longer night. She is sitting in numb silence with a cup of tea when they come to the door.

They--who are they? Youths--thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. I try to see their faces, to look for something familiar.

After quiet conversation with my wife, they ascend the stairs in reverent single file. She stands at the bottom landing, watching them, and then turns her back. They're going to that room with the closed door, and she cannot watch. I follow them instead of her, wanting to see, wanting to remember.

I know these kids. I think they have been to my grave. Why?

The room is not a study. It's a bedroom, decorated in pink and turquoise, stuffed animals, pop stars, fairy lights that haven't been plugged in for many months.

Two of the girls are crying now, hugging each other. A third gazes at photos tacked to the wall above a small desk.

"Angie," she whimpers, pulling down one of the photos.

Angie--that was my daughter's name. I had a daughter.

I can finally see. There is my daughter's face in the photos, smiling, carefree, posing with her friends.

One of the kids sets down an open folder on the desk. On top is a newspaper article. The words are so large and bold, I can actually read them:

SMALL TOWN TRAGEDY

DRUNK DRIVER AND DAUGHTER, 13,

KILLED IN HORRIFIC CRASH

I have seen this before. Every now and then, it comes back to me.

"Baby... why were you taken from me?"

My wife's voice, delicate as milkweed.

It was never my grave.