3
Of course, this all brings me to the biggest complication of all: I am still in love with Cooper Nichols. My second life would be so much easier if I could quit him, but I can’t. And the funny thing is, I don’t think I want to.
I remember the very first time I got to see Cooper from up here, actually. It was so beautiful, and such a gift. The Transmutation took about a week, Earth time, and after that, I still couldn’t look at him or get to him – there was too much heartbreak and fury to pierce through. His misery was all my fault, and I knew it. I should’ve told him about my fate before he fell in love with me, and I should’ve given him a chance to leave while he still could. So I came back to help.
I learned very quickly that the souls in the grey area like to visit Earth sometimes. Since we’ve been demoted to ghost status, most of us figure, why not have fun with it? Therefore many of us haunt our families with our love. Grieving humans often describe spotting glimpses of the faces of their fallen loved ones throughout the day, and they are usually written off as delusional. But they are right as rain. Some of us float into your rooms in the misery hours before dawn and watch you sleep, maybe caress your cheek and cherish you and send dreams of ourselves into your minds while you smile and breathe, but usually the visits are more mischievous. Some souls insert themselves in the form of numbers, smells, strange feelings, unexplainable coincidences. But mostly we like to show our faces – we can’t resist the look of shock in your eyes when we pop back into our former world, our former lives, for split-second visits. We show ourselves in the neighbor’s hedge on a morning walk, on the passing body of a stranger in the city at noon, in an alley when you jerk your head to the side on an evening jog and think to yourself, What the hell was that? And then we soar away, laughing, smiling, reminiscing. Our faces are everywhere – denying us is the first thing you’re doing wrong.
Very rarely we are able to fully cross over and reveal our whole spiritual selves, but this lasts only seconds, as it requires an absolutely tremendous amount of energy. Just like any being, we use and produce energy as we operate, and therefore we must suck up every ounce of energy around us in order to become physically present again, even for a split-second. Sudden cold spells, strange gusts of wind, slamming doors, mysteriously extinguished candles, light bulbs that turn off for no reason – this is us. We are not haunting you, we are hugging you, and in order to do that we must hog every bit of energy around us. Next time it happens, don’t be scared. Just watch. You might learn something.
The first few times I tried to light the fuse, to make the connection pop and visit Cooper back down on Earth, I failed miserably. Reaching humans feels like holding your breath underwater, and my lungs weren’t strong enough yet. I’d try to sink down into his room and visit, but I wasn’t strong enough. Souls like to see their loved ones when they are falling asleep, hovering on the edge of consciousness, as it is easier to access them in their twilight dreams than when they are either fully awake or lost in deep sleep. So those first few times I’d reach out for him just as he slipped into slumber, only for the connection to disappear with a zap, yanking me away and jerking him awake. I never understood it at the time, but now that I’m up here, I know exactly who was trying to see me when I was alive and I would snap awake just before midnight so many times over the years: it was my grandmother, Mam. She wanted to tell me to remind my mother to watch her blood pressure.
I waited, I prayed, and finally I knew I was strong enough to fully come back. I floated down into his room, there in my beloved town where I had lived and loved and expired, born to die in the blink of an eye, and it was like seeing him for the first time all over again. He was the same, but also even better than I remembered. Oh, my soft, strong, gentle boy. His brown hair touched with gold on top, his sinewy arms – he was like a dream while you were awake, a fantasy with open eyes. I felt like I’d been gone a hundred years, and seeing him brought out eons of sadness and a brand new rush of joy all at once. I smiled at his hair, the color of sand on a hot day, and his brown eyes, the kind made for staring at during sunsets on the beach under fading lilac skies. And then I felt something else, a strangely human sensation I’d already forgotten about: nerves. I was nervous. Regardless of all the bizarre logistics of my new otherworldly situation, I was still a girl laying eyes a boy she had once loved. I felt a twinge of something deep within my spirit, and then a cold breeze on the skin I didn’t have. And that’s when I realized I was falling in love all over again.
I watched him, felt him, experienced him. And soon it was the summer again. The sea, the pier, Funfetti cake, our long luxurious talks about fate and God and the ways of the world: the memories were so fresh, and so far off. Here was the boy I’d loved on the shores of Jacksonville Beach, and seeing him again was so beautiful and so hard. Because he wasn’t okay. He looked all out of tears. At this point I didn’t really know how to interact with humans yet, and so I just started talking. But what do you say to your soul mate when you are trapped on the other side of life? When you are nothing but a soul?
“Hi,” I whispered, smiling down at him, overcome by the peace his presence brought me. “I’m Summer. You might remember me from a summer that changed both of us. I just want you to know that I’m here. And I’m not leaving.”
He said nothing.
“Hey!” I said, louder. “Cooper! Hi!”
I stared at him. Why wasn’t he saying anything?
And that’s when I looked in his mirror and saw nothing where I should’ve seen my reflection. Then I realized I had forgotten that I was dead. I was a ghost. I was nothing. And I was in love.
Cooper looked over, drawn by the strength of my emotions, and I was gone.
And you might call me crazy. You might call me a fool. But I know the truth: he needs me. When he hatched the plan to kill himself, I was literally mortified. It wasn’t his time yet. So I did everything I could to sway him: I sent gloomy visions of myself to his dreams to let him know I disapproved, I sent the fortune cookie, the Saviour message. I saved his life by preventing him from taking it. And now I have a new Cooper, a Cooper renewed – and I will do anything to make his second act a showstopper instead of a dud.
After I found that my intervention worked, that I had a small bit of power up here, I started interfering each day, doing all I could to save him. And I have only just begun. I am in love with him, and every second I see him is the sweetest torture in the universe. But I will regret none of that misery, because I know I was put on the Earth in the beginning to place my heart on the line and then have it be smashed to pieces. And when I picked them up again, I did so knowing that I did everything possible to feel every emotion I could during every moment I got on this haunted carnival ride they called life. And as I soar into my future, I do so with my head held high, wounded and fortified with the knowledge that in a world where you can do anything, I chose to love – and that made all the difference, even when it hurt.
Humans think the only romantic love that exists is Gone With the Wind-type love – you know, big, weepy, sweeping, bodice-ripping, kiss-kiss love. And that exists, of course. But when someone moves on too early, that can transform into what we call Guardian Love. This is not Friday night love. This love is subtle, the kind that filters in on a Sunday morning, lingering between silky sheets, slipping in and saving you. But it is just as strong. Cooper is mine now, and I follow him as lovingly and loyally as an old lovesick dog trailing his owner through the house on a trip to the kitchen. When Cooper ran to his car and drove miles down the highway at midnight to escape the demons in his heart three months after my death, it was me that woke him up just as he swerved toward an incoming van full of teenaged boys on the way home from a soccer meet. He felt a slight jolt, sat up straight, and avoided catastrophe at the last possible moment. That jolt was me, loving him enough to save him. He even sensed me for a moment, felt the cool breeze of me passing through, but he shook his head and told himself he was crazy. Humans are so good at that, denying the obvious. They are conditioned by the world to grow up and kill their hearts and put on business suits and become logical and practical and stop believing in the miraculous power of love. But I am still around, and his denial of me will not sway my loyalty to him. Because you can’t run from Sunday love. I am here, dressing his wounds, putting salve on his spirit. And I am not leaving, because he is my heaven on Earth, even though I’m already in heaven.
You’ve got a Guardian, too. I promise. You’ve already seen or felt us, you just don’t want to believe it. We are everywhere. We are the air you breathe, the horizon you admire, the smile that creases your grandmother’s cheek. That little jumpy feeling you got in your chest when you just read that sentence? That’s a loved one from the past, saying hello. We’re always popping in like that. Every bizarre “coincidence” that pushes you along in the road of life, every time you sink into a rut and something falls out of the sky that seems entirely too suspicious to have happened accidentally – that’s us. That’s the love we left behind. We are the prickly feeling you get every time you feel someone watching in a dark room and look over your shoulder, we are the comfort that washes over you after you slip out of your mind for a moment and almost veer off the road but catch yourself just in time. What humans call “miracles” are everywhere – it’s just that no one is paying enough attention to notice them or believe in them. Humans refer to the stories of their lives as “destiny” – up here we simply call this the age-old process of humans’ departed loved ones leading them safely into the future on a golden string of fate like a fish on a fishing line, meddling from above like so many fussy grandmothers, our touch so full of love that you don’t even notice us. Why are you so insistent on believing that your life is but a random series of happy accidents? Where’s the magic in that? And call me precious or sentimental all you want. These words are simply constructs of humans, so intent on squashing emotion, on running from anything that invokes feeling within them. But they will learn one day. I am faithful.
If you’ve recently lost a loved one, hold onto them. If you think you’re seeing strange signs from above, if you think random coincidences are adding up, they are. Your loved one is trying to tell you why you were chosen to stick behind. But don’t turn your head. Don’t tune them out. Listen until you get the message. It is your destiny, in so many more ways than one.
Anyway, Cooper has an angel in me, and I know he has noticed. Because I would do anything for that boy – I would lay down it all for him, a million times over. And I have been. The time I slipped and presented a vision of myself at the beach, the time I intervened and dropped his suicide brick through the floor and sent him that fortune cookie quote: that was all me. (And there was so much more he will never know about, too. The aneurysm that tried to strike him that evening while he was at the movies with his mother…well, let’s just say I took care of it. No aneurysms will be occurring on my watch.) That time he was walking on the sand cliffs on the St. Johns River and missed stepping on a rattlesnake by two inches while wearing sandals? That was the whisper of what I was, warning him. That time he convinced himself he wasn’t good enough for that writing contest and then felt a strange change of heart and entered his essay anyway and won? That was the shadow of my life, urging him on from within. I am a cloak of bravado and protection, pushing him along, looking out for him, sending love in the only way I can, even when he denies me. Because you can’t deny love. You can’t lie to a heart. Nature and supernature ensure it.
And I need to make a correction. When I said dying is easy, but living is the grandest adventure of all, I was somewhat incorrect. Dying is just only the next step in this long and winding and very difficult and simple journey we call life. You are on the other side of the window, staring at the reflection of what you used to be, wanting desperately to jump back into your life. And you cannot. Some people grow angry and move on. Some stay, screaming at their reflection. But I am looking beyond. I want to help everyone inside my old life that I can.
Death is so much like life. Many people fall in love with multiple people over their lifetimes, but can they stay with all of them at the same time? In death, you must choose where you place your time and efforts, just as you must when you are alive. You must make the choice nobody wants to make: whom you will love. But just because I had to choose to stay with Cooper doesn’t mean I can’t visit the others. I just do it through him – I watch them through his eyes, smell them through his nose, hug them through his arms. Every time he hugs my mother Shelly and she swears to God that she can feel me, she can. It is me. I am in his every touch, embedded in his very fingerprint. When our souls fused together that summer, I think that I was ensured a spot in his future and in his body forever. Every time Cooper comes to my house and my little brother feels a strange chill in the air, that is me, watching over them. And I will never leave. Not under my own volition, at least. Cooper is now the conduit of me, and I will do all the good I can. Thanks to our summer of sepia-toned antique love, I can do anything through him – and I am so grateful.
~
Sunset in April. Cooper walks out onto his deck at his mom’s house, inhales the spring breeze. He looks beautiful and it hurts so badly. I have now been dead for months in Earth time, and I can feel every second of that absence. A thunderstorm is exploding to the northwest over the swamps of Georgia, a silver anvil in the clear amber skies. He studies the mushroom cloud blooming in the heavens, and suddenly I know just what he is doing: he is thinking of what his mom told him recently. He is daring me to show myself.
Show me, Cooper is thinking tonight. He has been flying so high, but his engines are sputtering, and he is feeling the most beautiful thing in the world right now: he is missing me. Sure, he’s seen my face a few times during blink-and-you-miss-it snapshots, but he wants concrete proof. If you are really here, if all of these signs are for real, I want to know it. His head wants verification of what his heart is feeling. He is human – this is only natural. And oh, how sweet it feels when he thinks of me. It is like being dipped into warm chocolate every time his thoughts wander to me. I savor his memories, even though I sometimes want him to move on with everything within myself. I feel like a departed grandmother being cried about for the first time by a grandson who had been pushing off the grief, or a dog owner who had been ignoring the sadness of a lost puppy until he takes a photo of his little friend to bed and weeps. I treasure every tear, because each of his drops of liquid grief mean he loved me – even if this makes me the most selfish soul in the universe.
Right now, on the porch, I am here, and I want him to know it. I want to take his breath away. He closes his eyes and opens them again, and tenderly, I reach down and paint myself in the sunset. He sees a whisper of my face in the cotton candy clouds above the palms, senses the ghost of me in the way the light peeks from the golden-orange horizon. He pauses, and for just a moment I think he will do the impossible and admit my invincibility. But then he tells himself he is crazy and looks away. So I whisper that I will always love him and fly into the stars. What a daring and reckless and gorgeous thing for any human to consider, that they are not alone in this world.
Oh, my poor, faithless Cooper, I think as I pass a rust-orange Mars. I have so much work to do with him yet. But I am far from giving up – galaxies from it, actually. I will save this boy, and I will make this boy believe – I swear it on this planet and every other one I have ever seen.
This is a second chance romance. Seeing Cooper again is proving that. I am getting the chance to live the life I never did, through all the people I loved and left behind. I want to help. Because they do need help – oh, so much of it. And most of all, I need to undo all the damage my departure created. The fate of my soul depends on it. I can sense that much. My death rearranged Cooper’s life, and now it is my responsibility to put him back together again. After all, he is more than worth the trouble.
Live and let die. Love and let live. Die and fly free. This is the motto of many souls up here; what they urge themselves to believe as they send one final tear-stained kiss to their still-living loved ones before soaring up into the sky to whatever lies beyond. It is not unlike when a doctor tells a family to leave the hospital during a loved one’s serious surgery: there’s nothing you can do for them. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you hang around. Go on a drive, go to the river, get out of here and take care of yourself. The doctor is the universe, and the family is me. I’m being banished, it’s just that I can’t listen. I can’t believe yet. I love my people too much to let them live, and I hate myself for it.