In Between

I felt the final drop fall onto the floor beside me, and I was free. Years of suffering under my dark cloud had finally subsided and I could see the light as I had played my requiem. My mother will cry, and my sister will hate me forever, but they just don’t see the progress. They don’t see the life that has opened up for me in this bed of white. They see their loved one in a box being covered with dirt, not my anguish and not my release. It’s like walking on clouds... Though there are a lot less clouds than I thought there would be.

There’s no one here really. Occasionally, I’ll get a dog that can sense me or a person who shivers when I walk through them, but this is not what I was expecting. I haunted those that bullied me for a few days, but that got old quickly, plus priests always know how to kill a party. I visited the ex that had cheated, and while I was initially pleased that she was getting her comeuppance, I realize why karma only seems to work when you are out of the picture. I used to wish death on the woman and now sobbed alongside her and her babies when her husband didn’t come home again. I had to leave when he came home and told her that not only was he replacing her, but she needed to get tested and get a lawyer if she wanted to keep her kids since I wanted to strangle him or rip his heart out the way he did hers but could only pass through him and maybe smell like a fart if I tried hard enough.

I tried to move on, but there aren’t many places to go now. I used to think my life was depressing, but after seeing others, I just think all life is depressing. I wonder why I was put here. I try to comfort my sister but just cries harder when I’m around. When I sent something beautiful her way, like a cardinal or her favorite butterfly, she says my name but then yells at the poor creature until its spirit is as broken as mine was. Sometimes, I wish the Ghost of Tuesday’s Future would take me by the hand and tell me everything is an omen, and I could wake up with a new outlook.

But, I don’t sleep to begin with and I learned that ghosts are just as trapped in their own reality as I am. Ghosts don’t talk to each other. We bump into each other and mutter a half-assed apology as we try to race to recreate our own Scrooge scene and see what life is like without us. We watch our mothers stop crying and start to go out to Bingo again with each other. We see our spouses rebuild, our children escape the struggle of the reality of death by grabbing onto their own lives. We plead with the living to not forget us when we forgot them the second we pulled the trigger or picked up the knife. Unlike them, we cannot cling to pictures and grieve memories. We have to swallow our memories, our perceptions of everyone we love, as we watch them all walk on without us.