The girl who became a ghost was only twenty-six when her heart ceased to beat.

The story of her death was a familiar one. A dark night, sheets of rain, a driver who couldn’t see. The wreck ejected her from her vehicle, straight through the glass; it shattered in the shape of a heart. The pain she endured was brief. One minute she was there, and the next she simply was not, and the pain, though extreme, did not consume her.

The boy who buried her was twenty-four when he dug her grave. She was his nine-hundred and twenty-second grave.

But hers was the first ghost he ever saw.

He saw her first when he finished replacing the pile of dirt atop her coffin. It had trickled down the sides in a waterfall of dark brown, soft. He watched it, entranced, until the sides were no longer visible beneath the brown. It always struck him as a kind of second death, this final removal of the body from earthly sight. No one would ever see the person whose body that had been again. It would decay to nothing, and even though they were already dead… it was like forcing them into death all over again.

Except for her.

She stood over her grave, solemn and sorrowful, gazing at the boy who caused her second death. He stared back, uncertain, bemused by her presence.

“Hello,” he said.

She said nothing.

He shook his head, certain he was hallucinating, and moved on to the next grave. When he looked up again, looked involuntarily to her burial site, she was gone, and a strange melancholy seeped into his heart.

The boy kept thinking about the girl by the grave. She had brown hair, he knew; he had seen the pictures at her funeral while he waited. She had blue eyes, the color of a dark lake. She had olive skin. But as a ghost, she was colorless. Her eyes were vacant and far away, her wispy white hair still wet from the rain. Her sheer skin glinted in the moonlight. She was, indeed, dead, and yet somehow she looked as alive as any person he had ever known.

One night he returned to her grave. She wasn’t there, but he sat beside her headstone anyway, stared at the space where she had been, and waited.

Her name was carved into the stone, and at some point in the night his fingertips absently traced the outline of each letter reverently, as if they were holy words. He mouthed her name under his breath, murmured it like it was sacred. He drifted off to sleep atop the spot where her body lay, and she watched him sleep soundly, and wondered at the power of a name.

While she watched him sleep, she found herself smiling. He was peaceful, completely still, curled into a ball on her grave. The only movement was his eyelids flickering as he dreamt, and she wondered what he dreamt of because there was a smile dusting his lips.

He dreamed of her.

The next morning, she still wasn’t there, and there was no trace of her having been there at all, but he felt compelled to return that night anyway. He simply sat there, again, staring at the place he had seen her only once before, and he traced her name and said it under his breath, and he fell asleep there, again.

And she watched him, again, and this time she saw his name-tag and whispered it like a wish.

They continued this way for weeks. Waiting. Watching. Wanting.

The night she chose to let him see her again, he wept. He wept for her death and he wept for her life and the fact that he never knew her until now. She would’ve cried, if she could, but since she couldn’t she only stood there and allowed the aching to overtake her until she sank to her knees beside him, beside the memorial which was all that was left of her life, and her hand passed through his.

They met every night for years. The boy became a man, the girl remained frozen in time. But they fell in love. Slowly, entranced by each other, aware that their love could never lead anywhere but to grief, they sank deeper into their affection until, finally, there was no hope of evading it.

“Don’t ever leave me,” the man said one night, when she was not immediately there.

“I won’t,” the girl swore.

But he could not promise the same.

One day the man met another woman. They befriended each other at a funeral, and the man laughed despairingly the day he realized he was falling in love with her. The only people he’d ever loved, all entangled with death.

The girl knew. She watched him grow distant. Waited longer periods of time for him to return to her. Wanted more than he could give, anymore.

His heart wanted someone else.

The day he left her, the girl relived her death. She was only able to see these two spots, these two places where her soul was burned into permanence, the site of her death and her graveside. She relived the panic of the drive, the unseeing fear. The anguish when her car slid after she slammed on the brakes as another car cut her off, and she crashed through the guardrail to the ravine below. The dizzying, blinding pain that engulfed her before, eventually, there was nothing.

It didn’t compare to the pain that overtook her when the man came to tell her it was the last night they would spend together. That pain swallowed her whole.

She would’ve wept, if she could have. Instead she sat beside him quietly until the sun rose, and when he left her, she reached for his hand and passed right through him. She whispered his name like a wish, and he was gone.

She was trapped alone there in that graveyard, just as alone as she had been in life, waiting endlessly beside her own grave for someone that was never coming. Three had been there when she was buried, including the boy. Over the years, the boy was the only one to ever visit her. To ever miss her. Her soul missed him for the rest of his life.

Not a day went by where the pain of losing the boy with the dreams did not threaten to consume her.

And for the rest of his life, he ached. He was happy, in love, fulfilled, and far away from the place where he had loved a ghost. But for the rest of his life, half of his heart felt like it was missing, and he was always halfway looking for a girl who was long dead.

Not a night ever passed that he did not dream of the girl by the grave.

Decades later, when he met his own death, he said one name, like a prayer.

The name of the girl.

The nine-hundred and twenty-second person he’d ever buried. The only ghost he’d ever seen. The first woman he’d ever loved.

When he died, and his soul was gone, the girl felt it. She felt the departure of her heart, the same way she’d felt the departure of her life. Finally, with nothing left to make her stay, her soul rested, too.

In a place that remarkably resembled her gravesite, he found her, but there was no headstone. No mound of earth concealing her body. There was only her. With brown hair, blue eyes, and olive skin.

She recognized the boy who had befriended a ghost and loved her like she was alive, and she wept with joy.

“Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

“I won’t,” he promised.

And this time, when she reached for his hand, her skin met his, and they never let go.

By Holly Wright

From: United States

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