11
For several months, I find a routine and sink into it: I take Lovelessons. I help Cooper. Sometimes I stand on my porch and watch the sea. Observing the fantasies of my fellow souls is fascinating and crushing – sometimes gargantuan dolphins jump from the water and then fall back to Earth with great splashes of water that reach the shore; sometimes snow falls out of nowhere. Sometimes we are inside the chambers of a beating heart, the endless bumb-bumps so full of empty hope. I am seeing the wishes of other souls play out in front of me, and it is fascinating. Sometimes I skip through the universe and go through history, and sometimes I lay in a bed of the softest feathers anyone could ever ask for. Then I grant wishes and play out scenes of peace for humans when I can. I can summon any desire here, fulfill any whim. I even find a sort of otherworldly bookstore one day, and I find the titles of the books written by my fellow souls to be endlessly fascinating. I loved books as a human more than anything, so I scan the sparkling shelves, enthralled:
Art from the Grey: Maintaining Your Creative Passions in the Beyond, by someone who would only identify himself as Wm. Shkspr.
Rising: A Guide for Preparing Yourself for the Other Side, by George Campbell Darcy
The Art of Letting Go: Saying Goodbye to the Life You Left Behind, by Noted Soulologist Samuel Poe
Let It Be, and Other Things I Wish I Could Tell the World About Yoko: by J. Lennon
They’re Going to Skip That Vacation and Go To That Business Conference Instead, So Stop Wasting Your Time: and Other Tips on Watching Your Living Loved Ones Fuck it All Up, by Dr. Alissa Marino
My Husband’s Family Did It, by Lady D. Spencer
I devoured every book I could, and time flew by. And soon I find my first Deathday arriving. We do not want to celebrate the anniversaries of our deaths, exactly, as we miss being human too much, so we celebrate the accomplishments of our loved ones down on Earth that have occurred since our deaths. Because every year they continue living their tiny little lives is another gigantic victory. They are winning for us down there, one day at a time.
I visit the soul of one middle-aged woman I have spoken to a few times and summon images of my family. “This is my little brother,” I tell her as Chase appears before me, decked out in his sports gear. “I’m so proud of him. He struck out three batters at his baseball game last week. And this is my mom. She’s started getting out of bed in the morning again. Isn’t it wonderful?”
We rejoice together, throwing flowers into the air as we cry. Then I go to someone else, a tribal man from the Indian Ocean who died while hunting for shells to eat. He still curses sharks every time one of them floats by in the grey area.
“This is Cooper,” I say as we watch him looking at the sea from his porch. Tears of pride fall into the Earth’s atmosphere, landing as rain on hopeless and faithless heads. “We were in love when I crossed over. Now he’s started writing poetry and walking on the beach again. I’m so proud.”
But the party doesn’t last long. Sheila arrives, as blunt and gruff as ever. “That’s the boy you’re so hung up on?” she asks. “Let him go.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your presence is dragging him down. Let him move on. He doesn’t need that baggage. And look at him – he’s a six pack away from needing rehab.”
“Exactly,” I say. “He’s so close to the edge, and yet he hasn’t jumped. I’ve never been more proud of him.”
I storm off in a celestial huff, my temper flares appearing in the form of Aurora Borealis over Norway. She is so wrong. This dead woman is wrong. They are still living down there, and I have so much to help with.
And the next day, as I watch Cooper, something strange happens, something neither of us were expecting: for the first time, Lily shows up in his writing. Sheila was wrong – he is moving on. And it is annihilating me.
He didn’t mean for it to happen, I think. He was sitting at his desk that overlooked a swath of the sea, writing poetry, or trying to, at least, in between drinking coffee and skipping between playlists. Finally he got deep into a love poem, and at the end of it, he wrote something that seemed to shock him:
you are a dream I don’t want to wake up from
a wave I don’t want to brace for
drown me in your seas, babe – relentlessly
this thing is supernatural
I am haunted and I like it
even if you are just a ghost
even if I am hovering on the edge of sleep
let me luxuriate in your madness
darling, please let me float in your waters
please don’t wake me up from you
please don’t take me from my Earthgirl
your eyes, blue like water
your hair, brown like bark
He sat back with wide eyes. He wasn’t writing about me. He was writing about her. She was officially his muse.
Up until now, I had been trying to figure out what this relationship was, where it was headed, if anything would come of it. Cooper was happier, but he also seemed to be out to sea from time to time. And this was the truth: it was love. Horrifying, lethal, beautiful love.
On Earth, the next day is her birthday. She is getting closer to thirty than twenty, and it makes her sad. He drives her to a park and leads her to her cake on a picnic table, but she is shocked to find it absolutely jammed with candles, packed so thick she could barely see any frosting. She purses her lips and eventually counts sixty candles.
“But it’s my twenty-sixth birthday,” she finally says, turning to Cooper. “What in the world? I was already feeling bad enough. Should I be insulted?”
Cooper just smirks at this girl, his new muse, my replacement. “Life expectancies are growing, right? Medicine and technology and Botox and all that. So, when I made this cake, I didn’t want to buy an amount of candles for the number of years you’d already lived on this Earth without me – I wanted the number of years I’d like to spend together with you on it. So, starting today, I want sixty years with you. And I’m not settling for anything less.”
Oh, no, I think as I watch. My Cooper is back. The one that swept me off into forever. The one I am still clinging onto with all the life I don’t have. The one I’d half-hoped he’d never become again.
I leave the scene and soar away as they have sex deep in the woods.
~
Several weeks later I sit with them at Guana State Park on the edge of a marsh, swatting away mosquitos as a Florida sunset splashes itself out in the heavens across the river. Something has seemed to click over the last few days. The previous night, when Lily left his house and started driving home, an overwhelming longing came over her, and she drove back immediately to find him standing in the driveway waiting for her, his face like an abandoned kitten. She slept over and crept out before his mom awoke.
She has been thinking about the future a lot. This sad boy she found all those months ago was now fortified, strengthened; not perfect, but getting there. She is starting to plan things out: she can use her trust fund to rent a bigger place, one with writing quarters for him. Neither of them will have to work. She can pursue her hobby of interior design during the day while he writes. At night they can walk to restaurants and go to bars and coffee shops and all the other things they love. All he has to do now is propose, and she will take over from there.
I zoom in on Cooper, my love, my divine torture. I don’t recognize the phone in his hand, and it makes me a bit sad, because the more his world changes, the less of a mark I will have on him. But I can do other things. The human world is always changing, and besides, I have never really cared about their surroundings. No matter what trinkets they hold in their hands, they are still humans, with simple desires and extraordinary urges.
“Why do you love me?” she asks, and I both hear and feel the doubt in her voice. He mumbles something that not even I can articulate.
“What?” she asks.
“Hmm. It’s just that…you looked at me when I was Depressed, Troubled Boy, but you didn’t see him. You saw right through all that. You saw…me. God only knows where I’d be without you, kid.”
He used to call me kid, I think with a flinch.
“But, yeah, you saw me when I was gone,” he says. “Nobody else saw anything in me but you.”
“But you’re still gone sometimes,” she whispers, turning away.
“What?”
She shakes her head, realizing the moment has gotten too real, too deep, too revealing. “Nothing. You know what? We look good. Let’s take a selfie.”
She raises an arm to take a photo of them, but she clicks the screen too early in the process, making everything except her face look strangely blurred.
“Don’t delete it,” Cooper says, holding out his hand.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what my world looks like. Everything’s a blur but you.”
Oh, Cooper, Lily and I think at the same time.
Now, I knew I had to leave then. But I couldn’t. And when the sun fully sinks below the trees ten minutes later, she leans into his shoulder, watching the clouds.
“Coop?” she asks.
“Yeah, babe?”
“I wanted to talk to you about the book thing.”
He flinches a little, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Okay?”
“Well, you know that, if we…end up together, or whatever, I would be happy to support you while you write for the Times-Union part time.”
“….Okay?”
Her bottom lip is swallowed into her mouth. “But, taking that into account, I also want you to write a book. I’ve talked to your mom about it, and she says you really owe it to yourself.”
He sighs. “Ugh. I’ll try. No promises. It’s…hard, after everything I’ve been through, to find that drive again.”
“I can imagine,” she says, and then she senses in his voice how much he hates himself. She moves closer, drops her voice. “But also…whatever you do, whatever you choose, I’m still gonna love you. You know that, right?”
“Oh, Lily. You too.”
He leans in and kisses her. A real kiss. A love kiss. And I am filled with panic. Suddenly I realize all over again that Lily has everything I never will: a beating heart. A body. A life. She is alive and I am a ghost. What have I done? Why have I set these two souls on a collision course for each other while I watch helplessly from on high?
I bury my face in my hands, but now that I am dead, I cannot escape him so easily. He is who I have chosen to follow, and there is nothing I can do to escape this, short of crossing over and leaving. So I cry all the tears I never did on Earth, the tears for Cooper, the tears for what we could have been, the tears for what he is building with Lily. And in my mind, I rise up and scream at them, begging them to stop.
Don’t touch him don’t touch him don’t touch him, let him let him go let him go, let me have him, I want him, I need him, I am nothing here, oh God, I am nothing here.
But some things are not built for avoiding.
“Marry me,” Lily says as she sits up, my words echoing meaninglessly into the chaotic quiet of the universe. Even if I wasn’t already nothing, I swear I’d still be nothing at all in that moment. “Marry me, Cooper Nash Nichols.”
Lily has never done anything like this. I suppose this is because of her chaotic family life, but she has never before been this forward with anyone in her life. She feels pathetic and desperate and submissive to be asking a boy for his hand in marriage, but she doesn’t care: she needs this boy forever.
“What?” he asks, and she closes her eyes before she can stop herself, a silent prayer sent out into Florida air.
“I said it. Marry me. I love you.”
He says nothing, and then I see it: I sense the vision that slams into his brain. It is my face.
“Fight your sharks,” he whispers, and she doesn’t quite hear.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says. I wipe my tears, and he smiles in a distant, far-off way. “You know, it’s funny. When I was little, I had this…”
“What?”
He laughs. “No. It’s silly.”
“Um, tell me. Clearly it’s important, if you’re bringing it up now.”
He swallows. “Okay, well, before I knew much about marriage, I’d tell myself I was going to propose to my girl with a Ring Pop. But only a strawberry one, because those were the absolute best, thank you very much. I didn’t even understand that you had to marry your girlfriend – I thought I was going to marry my mom, since she was the woman I was always with. I think I even proposed to her once, actually, at church.”
“Why are you telling me this right now, Cooper?”
He takes a Ring Pop from his pocket, and she gasps as hell visits me. “Because all this has been on my mind, and I bought this three weeks ago.”
She waits, but he says nothing. Instead he turns out to the marshy sunset and sighs. It is nearly summer again, and the world is in bloom. “But, you know, I’m just…scared. Everyone leaves. Everyone has left me. How do I know…how do I know you won’t…”
She sighs. Then she takes his hand softly, tentatively. “Cooper, it’s not going to hurt you to love me. You know that, right?”
He tries to look away, but then he smiles, and suddenly I think, oh my God – he’s so young. I’ve forgotten just how young he is. He is like a little boy. He has been dealt such a bad hand in life, and he was forced to mature so quickly, that I have totally forgotten how young he really is. Humans forget too. They always forget. They always outgrow the children inside of them. But Cooper is remembering to smile, slowly but surely. And I cry, too, as I stare down at my boy, young and free at last.
And all at once, Cooper realizes that happiness has never even occurred to him. Not lately, at least. After the great wave of grief that my death smothered him with, he stopped seeing anything but his lonely grey existence as being in the cards, and he forgot that being glad was a choice that was available to him. So he shut himself off, shut himself out, and told himself he was content with misery. The world was against him, and he would respond by turning up his nose and retreating, because you couldn’t kill something that was already dead. But suddenly he wasn’t so sure anymore. Suddenly he was smiling. Suddenly he was happy, and it was real, and he was capable of feeling it, and oh, God, what if tomorrow he was happy, too? What if contentment wasn’t a golden fantasy rainbow, forever on the unreachable horizon? What if he could wake up next week and next month and next year and feel just like this? What if the future was no longer something to dread? What if he could actually be happy?
And this is the beautiful acid instant when a depressed person gets the signal that they are ready to move beyond their sadness: the simple, miraculous moment when happiness filters back in.
Cooper smiles, and it is so beautiful. Lily is undoing the damage I did to him, and I am so grateful and destroyed, thankful and collapsed. If only I could sift down into the clouds and somehow tell them of how beautiful and how haunting this is, to see two hurt people putting their pieces back together, uniting in damaged love.
“You really want to marry me?” she asks, and I wonder whether I love her or hate her.
“Yes,” Cooper says. “But I still don’t have a real ring.”
“I can buy my own diamond. I’ve had money all my life and it never got me anywhere. I just want you.”
“Okay, Lily. Marry me.”
Her eyes bloom like American Beauties. “Oh, God, Cooper. Yes. Okay, I will.”
I smile and watch and cry. I can’t look away from this, and I hate myself for it. Humans aren’t done yet. The world is still a giant surprise. Oh, the places they will go. There are so many glories yet to be achieved, so many triumphs to be made, so many victories to be felt. There are gem-laden shipwrecks just waiting to be found and humanity-altering scientific breakthroughs just begging to be discovered and so many artistic masterpieces still waiting to be dreamt up. Humans are on a march to the top, I cannot deny that. But nothing, nothing at all, will ever trump a sunset of quiet love with the one your heart dreams of. Never has there been a wish more beautiful or more profound, for a forever with the one you love.
And as the sun slips out from behind the clouds in the west, seeming to light them from within, Cooper slides the strawberry Ring Pop of his boyhood dreams onto Lily’s finger, uniting them for perhaps forever. I watch her face illuminate like the sky, and suddenly I pretend I am her – I feel the flutter in her chest, the drop of her stomach, the tears rolling down her cheeks. I imagine exactly how she must be feeling right now, the shuddering heart and the sweaty palms and all the other things that came from being young and alive and in love and getting a ring from the man of your purest dreams. And all over again, I wish I could move on from here.
Something in me cracks, and I consider doing it: breaking them up, if only for a moment. Sending the worst storm of their lives onto the marsh, making the skies turn black, maybe even creating a tornado and sending it straight for them. Unleash all the power and all the fury of a wizened soul with all the fire in the world at her fingertips. I could ruin this moment, stop this love. But at the last minute, I don’t. I want to see love succeed, even if I am not the one being loved. And maybe, I realize, just maybe I am getting better at controlling this new version of myself.
But as I leave, it occurs to me for the very first time why humans call us “ghosts:” nothing I could ever say, nothing I could ever do, nothing I could ever wish, could stop him from falling in love with her.