Apparition

He stood propped in the doorway, hands in his pockets, a small smile on his lips, eyes flashing in the small light from her reading lamp. An encouraging nod, the open, friendly posture, it was all so perfectly him, right down to the black canvas jacket with a torn epaulette over his right shoulder.

His hair could do with a cut, but his face was clean shaven. It wasn't always that way. Somehow, he still managed to change, even when the rest of her life stood still. On the days he was different, it was like watching time pass for him while she stood rooted. On the days he was the same as the last time...

A stray lock of fair hair fell across his right eye, and he took a hand from his pocket to comb it back into place. He was waiting for her to say something, waiting for her to tell him about her day or complain about something or other. Waiting for her to make the first move.

Instead, she turned out the light and he vanished into the dark.

It wasn't every day that he would come back into her life. Sometimes whole weeks would pass away before she saw him again. But the very next morning, he was waiting for her as she locked her door and turned to walk with her. Again, he didn't speak, simply walking along side, keeping her company.

Different clothes, a growth of beard now and a rebellious zit on his left cheek, the reason he would give for not shaving if she asked. But his footsteps were silent as he walked on her road-side, quietly enjoying the bright spring day with her.

She said nothing, simply waited for him to go on his way. Imagining that he would finally take the hint. Whether or not he did, she couldn't tell, but when she stepped onto the bus and looked over her shoulder he was gone.

Eight days later, he was on her couch, one arm thrown lazily over the backrest, and she spoke. “What are you doing here, Anis? Don't you have anyone else to annoy?”

Turning his head, hair falling to cover one green eye, leaving one staring at her out of a face suddenly cast in shadow. The effect sent goosebumps rippling down her arms, now wrapped around her stomach to ward off a sudden blast of cold despite how warm her house had felt when she first came in from the rain.

“You know the answer to that, Deidre.”

“I don't. I don't know why you won't leave me the fuck alone.”

On a sigh, he rose from the couch and turned to face her. His shadow would have almost reached her, his thin face now completely dark with only its sharp plains and angles outlined so that it almost resembled a skull. In his plain black t-shirt and washed-out blue jeans, the glow of his eyes seemed to hang in the air. His tone was still soft, his words gentle, like the memory of his hand on her arm.

“You do know, Deidre. You know exactly why, but you aren't ready to say it yet.”

She wasn't ready. She would never be ready. But his presence demanded it from her. Demanded that she tell the truth, demanded that she accept what she could not, would not believe.

“You shouldn't be here,” it was her last defense and it sounded almost pathetic on its way out. The words tasted like vinegar on her tongue, but she refused to say what she knew she needed to say.

“Is that what your therapist told you? That I shouldn't be here, that you shouldn't be seeing me?”

“I... she... no.”

“Haven't told her, then?” she could not see his face but she could almost hear his eyebrow cock skyward. Almost see the look of gentle concern on his face. “Why?”

No answer. There was no answer. Well, there was one. But how could she tell him that? He was standing right in front of her, all but towering despite his attempt to mask his height with a slouch. What could she possibly say to explain why she did not, could not tell anyone about him?

“I'm sorry, Anis... I'm sorry.”

“Ah...” his sigh was like the soft sound of wind on summer leaves. She could not say what she wanted to say. Could not move on. She could not find a way to quit him, and that sound, the sound that she realized only too late she had associated with home for years tore into whatever was left of her soul. “Deidre. You'll never be free unless you can say it. Never be able to move on until-”

“Don't tell me what I need to do,” the words exploded from her, ripped across the room and lodged in his chest. Or at least, they would have done, if anything she could say or do could reach him. If they had ever been able to reach him.

“Anis, you... you DO NOT get to tell me what I need to do. Do you hear me? Never again! Never... not after.”

“Not after what?”

“I'm sorry...” the words caught in her throat, stuck there, slowly choking the life from her, starving her mind of the ability to focus on, to think of anything else. “I'm...”

He moved around the couch, his booted feet making no sound on the scarred hardwood floor of her living room. Each silent step carried him closer until he was only an arm's length away, until his shadow should have blotted out the light completely as it had used to do; back when she would use him as a shield against the sun or the wind and complain about how thin he was.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“LIAR!”

“Deidre-”

“I'm sorry I couldn't save you, Anis. I'm... I'm...” tears cut off her words, and yet the ones she needed to say were still lodged in her throat. Trembling, her knees threatened to give out, to collapse and leave her a weeping puddle on the floor. Just like the day she had first tried to remove him from her life, from her memory.

“What could you have saved me from? Myself? Don't beat yourself up over that,” he did not move, and that was the most terrible part. She had never been one for casual contact, so he had almost never even laid a comforting hand on her arm the way she had seen him do to so many others. The way she had been jealous of for years before she even had a name for the emotion. But there had been times before he…

“There was nothing you could have done, you know that. You have to know that.”

“No. No. No no no no! That's not true! I could have seen the signs, I could have... I should have done something!”

“You know that's what everyone else says. You're not an island, Deidre. No one is.”

And like that he was gone. The shadow that would never shield her from the light again, the one that had not been there even as he stood tall, blocking her view of the lamp behind him. She was alone again, alone with her memories.

One small, trembling step, then another, and a third. Slowly, painfully slowly, she moved across the floor that should have held dusty prints from his boots until she stood before the place he had sat. Looked at the unmarked leather that should have still held the impression of his body.

Falling, finally letting her legs lose the fight against gravity, she collapsed onto the cold seat that should have been warm. Should have still held some memory of him. It all felt so real. She sometimes still felt as though he would walk through the door and hold aloft a tray of fresh-baked something, saying that he had juicy gossip. But it wasn't real. It never would be again.

All she had left were the memories.

-0-

Sitting at her kitchen table the next morning, she stared without seeing at the chair across from her. It was empty, but then it usually was. Even back then. Though before there had always been the chance. Always been the possibility that someone would come through the door, that he would.

“Are you ready yet?”

He was sitting in that chair now. Right before her eyes, how had she not seen him? A smile nearly burst onto her face, she nearly leapt from her chair to exclaim about having had the strangest dream and then playfully refuse to tell him what it had been about.

His hair was freshly cut, styled in that way she always told him would drive the girls crazy if he would only try to talk to them. Cheeks with that shadow that one of their friends had once said worked so well on him. The same clothes he had worn the last time… He was not smiling, though. His eyes were dark, not glinting the way they normally would in the morning light.

Resting his head on the heel of his left hand, fingers curled to cradle his cheekbone, he only looked at her. It was a look she knew all too well, a look that meant he was worried about her. Stupid man, always so busy worrying about everyone else that he... that he...

Eyes flicking towards the table, she saw his right hand, only inches away from her own, gold Claddagh ring with its heart perpetually pointing outwards failing to shine. She reached for his hand, and he didn't move. Then again, he never had before so that wasn't so unusual, only continued to look at her with open, earnest, caring concern.

She stopped a few centimeters from his skin, feeling the absence there. The lack of sensation that meant she was no closer to actually touching him than she was the sun. It was something she had never noticed before, the almost imperceptibly small vibrations that meant there was something there, something physical that she could actually touch.

“I take that as a no.”

“You should know how I feel,” she muttered the words but not in anger. Not in the almost sullen way that sometimes escaped the lips of every adult no matter how far removed they were from the child they had grown out of being. “You're just a figment of my imagination, right?”

“You don't think that.”

“But you say it!”

“Sometimes I have,” he shrugged, his plain black t-shirt rustling with the movement. “But do you believe it?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It always did to me.”

“Why did you,” but she couldn't finish the sentence. Could not ask him since she knew he could not answer.

His eyes were sad now, their colour shifting just slightly, turning almost blue in that way they did before he cried. “You know I never wanted to leave you.”

“But you did,” the words sounded almost petulant to her, and she loathed herself for that. For arguing with herself like a child. For not being able to... to let him rest. “You're not real.”

“I am real, Deidre. I'm as real as I ever was.”

“No!” she threw a mug at him, rage rising to a sudden crescendo like a wave out of a calm sea. The mug passed straight through him, the image of him neither wavering nor blurring, to shatter against the opposite wall. “You're not real! You're not! You're... you're...”

“Say it,” his voice was unchanged. Soft, gentle, calming, exactly the same voice he had used the last time she'd seen him, the time he had said his most loaded goodbye. “Please, my friend, say it.”

“Dead.”

“Yes.”

“You died and you left me behind.”

“I did.”

“I hate you.”

“For now, maybe. But I don't think that's going to be to true forever. You don't even hate the memory of me. You only hate what I did.”

“Please,” the rage was gone, sucked down a drain in the very core of her being, leaving behind a void, a vacuum where she floated in the perfect, silent, emptiness. “Please leave me alone.”

“That's not my choice to make anymore. You have to let me go.”

“And how do I do that? How do I move on!? Tell me that! Explain to me how, when my best friend eats a bullet, I'm supposed to just... just move on!”

“It's your life, Deidre. I... I made my choice. You think it was the wrong one, and maybe you're right. But what are you going to do? Follow me?”

“No.”

“No. Because you're a survivor, you're a person who can't even be knocked down, let alone knocked out of the fight.”

“You always said things like that. Always tried so hard to build me up, even when you were the one who needed it.”

“Don't think about that. Talk to your therapist about me. The me that was, and the me you see sitting across from you. Her literal job is to help you deal with things like this. And,” he offered a grin that was barely a shadow of the one he had always used to tease her, “think of me with fondness please. You can grieve, you HAVE to grieve. But in the end, do you want to carry that hate forever?”

“I want to forget you.”

“No you don't.”

“...”

“Are you ready to say it, to admit it to yourself yet?”

“I...”

“Go on. There's no one here to judge you, I'm not even really here. You're talking to a mirror.”

“I always hoped I'd go first. I never thought that you would... that I would have to watch them bury you. I... I want my friend back.”

“That’s not what you need to say.”

-0-

He did not appear to her again for months. The sun rose and set every day, and slowly she began to feel herself. Her friends all but threw her a party when she found the courage to see them again. They all laughed and cried and raised a glass in honour of a good friend now lost.

She signed up for a charity run, money going to the usual mental health places. It wasn't so much that she was trying to make amends, her therapist had told her that it was an impossible dream. She had done nothing wrong, there was nothing to make amends for.

Another thing the professional listener and advice giver had said was that the ghost was not entirely abnormal. Sometimes people manifested these things to help themselves cope. That he had not returned was something to be happy about, it most likely meant that she was healing. Though the recommendation to journal her thoughts and feelings on the matter was strong.

Finally, on a late summer evening, she stood before a tall iron gate and looked at a field of grey stones standing in orderly rows. Since the day of the funeral, she had never found the courage to come here, to walk as one among the dead.

Taking that first step through the gate, her foot crunching on the white gravel, she sensed him walking beside her but did not turn to look. Instead, she just tried to enjoy the fading warmth as the sun slid towards the horizon. Tried to focus, as everyone always told her to, on the good memories she was there to share with the dead.

His headstone was simple, it was exactly how he would have wanted it. The grass had grown over the plot after the mounded earth had settled, erasing his final mark from the world. She stood in silence for a long time, as the world turned slowly away from the sun, before she finally spoke.

“I don't know what to say,” her voice was ragged, harsh with unshed tears. She thought she had long since run out of those. “I'm sorry, I guess. Sorry that I couldn't... couldn't say it back then.

"I always loved you. For a little while I thought maybe it was romantic, I thought that there was something between us. But that wasn't true. I realized that I just... I wanted you in my life. I was so happy to just know you. You really were my best friend and... and... I wasn't ready to say goodbye."

“How lucky am I,” said the ghost beside her, “to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

She turned to look at him then, nearly stumbling away. He was wearing the plain black t-shirt and washed-out blue jeans that he had the last time she'd seen him. As far as she knew, they were the clothes he had died in.

“Haven't seen you in a while. Thought maybe I'd gotten over needing to talk to you.”

“You might see me again some day, but it'll only be as a memory. I thought it was important to leave you alone. Give you time.”

“You... what?”

“Guess my time's finally up, eh?”

“Anis, what are you... what am I making you say?”

“Oh yes... sorry about that lie. Well, I suppose it wasn't entirely a lie. There were moments when you imagined me being there. When you spoke to an illusion. But... well, it’s time to say it, Deidre,” he laid his hand on her shoulder, and she felt it. Not a memory of a memory, but there was a weightless weight to it. As though something cold had gripped her in just the way she remembered him doing on occasions that, looking back on it, were far too few and far between.

“Goodbye, Anis. I’ll remember you.”

“This is it, I'm afraid. It's been nice being able to see you again. But the most important thing is, even when we're apart... I'll always be with you.” And just like that he was gone, leaving her standing in the waning light of a summer's day with a grey stone bearing his name in front of her.

Damn man. Leaving her like that. Making her grieve him a second time. And quoting Winnie the Pooh as he did? She hated him. Hated... no. He had been right about that. She didn't hate him. Only hated what he had done, and... no, she didn't hate herself either. The guilt was there, but it was... less now?

Like he had said. In the end, there was nothing she could have done.

She looked over, tried to find where he had gone, the sensation of something on her shoulder slowly fading. Then turning her attention back to the gravestone, she finally said the word that had been choking her for months, setting it, him, and herself free.

“Goodbye,” the word, the memory of his voice floated past on the wind, just beyond hearing.

Now all she had left were the memories.