Double Exposure

There was only one rule: don’t open the door…

If only I had listened to my own advice. If only I had not listened to my heart. Now, my heart is dead. I know I sound utterly crazy and dramatic, a bad combination but being who I am, I cannot help it.

I didn’t open the door. I didn’t know what or who was always lurking just behind the door. But, as soon as I saw the flicker of the photograph slid under my doorframe, I was immediately struck by a sudden explosion of nostalgia, & weird, soft feelings.

The message in cursive was the same:

May I come in?

I let in the photograph, however, not the photographer. I love the old fashioned look of matte. And, it was a double exposure. It was of a single woman, bare, exposed, with a ghostly echo of her shadow, turned to her naked gaze.

I was surprised by these everyday intrusions into my otherwise quiet existence: the same picture everyday with the same message. I got the same gut punch feeling of something eerily familiar.

“Ash, honey; what’s happened to you, son? The last time I visited you, you looked ghostly pale,” my mother complained. I was a recluse by nature, a human head-case with no intention of going out. Not just because of the pandemic. I needed to know my unknown visitor.

At the right moment, my door flew open before the picture arrived…

A flash of intense, starlit eyes; I felt our pasts collide, we were soul-strings in a double-exposure. I saw our past; my dark, eternal lover. I was the woman in the picture. I died long ago before he could turn me, & he vowed to find me.

I broke my one rule. I let him in.