7
Three weeks later, in Earth time at least, they are on a date at Columbia House restaurant in St. Augustine. It is where he took me during one of my last nights on Earth, and it breaks me and fills me with hope to see them there all at once. It is a place of love, but still, everywhere I look I see us laughing in the candlelight, whispering with Autumn as Saviour played in the background, loving each other when I was young and alive and had a breathing set of lungs suspended in my chest. It makes me wish against everything in the world to go back and look into his eyes a little harder, hold his hand a little tighter, love him a little more deeply. But a dead girl digresses.
I find at least one small ounce of comfort in the fact that at least this restaurant wasn’t his idea – Lily said she liked the sangria. (My kind of girl, it seemed.) I studied them as they got the usual niceties out of the way. She was quiet in a way that suggested she was holding back. She was kind, mostly. She radiated the kind of serene confidence only a lifetime of money could buy. One of her great-grandparents was involved in the founding of Standard Oil, and she will never have to work a day in her life. But that has not kept her safe from heartbreak. In fact, all the money ever seemed to do was make her different, isolate her, make her family go off the rails. Money ruined her. Humans romanticize attention and fame and forget that when everyone in the room is staring at you, that usually means you’re alone. And she was a bit of a mess underneath the glamour.
Watching Cooper get dressed for the date was so adorable it broke my soul. I watched him change into and out of three different shirts, I watched him ask his mother how to fix his hair, and then disregard her advice and do nothing at all to it. It is good that he is so nervous: it shows he cares. It shows he will put in an effort instead of sitting there silently all night. It shows that he is ready. Still, I want to be the one to look into his brown eyes tonight. I want to be the one he walks to the car, I want his fingers to run through my hair. But I’m dead, and he’s got a destiny to chase.
Even though Cooper is depressed, he is still Cooper, meaning he is occasionally a cocky prick. The way he looks at Lily makes her mad. He thinks very little of her, and it shows – but she is drawn to his disapproval. All she ever knew were her parents’ employees and groupies and hangers-on. Who was this dark and funny and beautiful and clearly damaged boy, to look down on her like that for no reason? Just what was behind the condescending smirk on his face?
And why was I reading so deeply into a situation that had nothing to do with me?
“So…this place is pretty,” she says after an awkward silence as they wait for drinks. “It seems old.”
“Pretty sure it’s a replica. Most of the buildings here are.”
“Oh,” she says. He leans back.
“Yeah. So…tell me something about yourself. Something interesting.”
She breathes, then meets his eyes. “Okay. My cat is named Princess Diana and she’s almost twenty years old.”
“…Huh?”
“Yep,” she laughs. Her laugh is loud and open and hearty – a real laugh, not the laugh of someone trying to sound coy or cute – and it makes me want to like her even more. But shouldn’t I hate her?
“We got her the week after Diana died, and for whatever reason I was so heartbroken by all the news reports – even though I had no idea who Diana even was – that I named her after the sad-eyed dead girl on the news. So, yeah – every time I look at her, I think of 1997 when all anyone could think about was that smashed-up Mercedes under that underpass.”
Cooper looks at Lily with brand new eyes. He wasn’t expecting something so…deep. And I am reminded again of how some humans should never underestimate the extent of their own ignorance. Here was a Monet wrapped in the package of an ice sculpture, and he’d had no idea.
Fifteen minutes later, she is laughing over some sangria. “Yeah, I know, I was so confused, too. God, I’m just glad I got out of the house tonight. Things have been…rough lately, I guess.”
“What do you know about struggle,” he says under his breath. No, Cooper, I think. Not tonight.
She crosses her arms and leans back, a strange smile on her face. The air around them takes a sudden turn for the worse. “What, now?”
He sighs. “I don’t know, it’s just…the last year of my life has been an absolute shit show. What could’ve happened to you to make your life so much worse?”
Her smile grows. Anger sinks down and clenches around her heart, heating her from within. “So let me get this straight, Mr. Doom and Gloom. You look at me and see David Yurman. You see velvet curtains and a nose that looks down on people. You think you have a monopoly on suffering, and you want me to suffer for it.”
“I mean…yeah. Pretty much.”
She rises from the table. “Okay, then. I have to go.”
“What? You just got here.”
She pauses, stares down at him.
“My father tries to kill himself every day,” she says, deadpan. “Every. Single. Day. He is so clinically depressed that if his full-time nurse isn’t home, he tries to jump out of the window. But I like to let her go home to her family sometimes, so I was going to relieve her. I can stay, though, if you want? If you’re not going to stereotype me and think I don’t know hardship, look at me like I’m some coddled ‘rich bitch’ who isn’t worth your time?”
He stares at her, new possibilities on his face. I want to fall into those eyes so badly, I have to look away for a moment. But still, I know he can sense it: this was the right person for him to meet. Somehow, someway, he was meant to meet her. This makes me smile from the grey area. He is so, so right.
“You might want to tell your nanny lady to stay,” he finally says, and just like that, he opens a little more of himself.
Twenty minutes later, he lets my name slip in a conversation about former flings. It singes me like a magnifying glass held in the sun.
“My last girl, Summer, she-”
He winces, stops short. Lily can feel pain in the air. She knows. She learned of me, of course, from her social media stalking – the messages of comfort on his wall were endless. She doesn’t know much, but she knows there was a death. She wants to ask for more, but she can’t. She is too afraid. So she lets it go and changes the subject.
On Earth, fear rules. Humans push back on the people they want to let in. They run from the people they want to catch them. It is not a myth that ninety percent of the human brain is completely inaccessible to them. They would be capable of so much more, but they are their own worst enemies. Or, more accurately, the part of their brains called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is their worst enemy. This controls self-awareness, that cursed Achilles heel of the human race. Every time humans stop what they are doing to look over their shoulder and wonder who is laughing at them, who is staring at them, who is judging them, they are defeating themselves, tampering with their own abilities and halting progress before it can even be made. What majesty could they create, what pools of knowledge and potential could they access, if they disconnected themselves from the sick and parasitic umbilical cord of their own fear? We will never know, because that will never happen – humans are too terrified of their own success and happiness to ever stop feeding on that fear. They let it limit and define them, and they always have.
But I am different now. I have been cured of my humanity. When I crossed over I took my soul and all the knowledge within it with me, and without the physical limitations placed on the soul by the frail and weak and flawed human body, I saw the universe open up in front of me. Asteroids were mine to ride. Solar systems were mine to observe. Dimensions were mine to skip through. Universal truths were mine to discover. And there was no fear.
But Cooper wasn’t dead – he was human. And even he knew he didn’t like the human he was becoming. Humans often do not realize what they have become until it is too late for them to change, and only now was he realizing he had turned into someone he did not recognize. Someone who slammed down cups for no reason and stared into the middle distance while other people spoke to him and grimaced all day for no reason at all. His hard life had already turned him inward on himself, but I was the deathblow that sealed him for good – and now he couldn’t even open up and turn on the happy switch when he tried. At least not beyond faking it. He had become dark and gruff and unpleasant, with nobody to blame but fate and me and himself. He had to get back to Cooper again. He had to.
I leave them for a moment, zooming back in after they bid the restaurant adieu and linger in an alley on the walk back to the parking lot.
“What is it?” she asks. “I had fun, but you seemed so…up and down tonight.”
“I just want you to know that I’m broken,” he says as he leans against a brick wall and stares at the ground, hating himself with his own words. Cooper’s face is perfectly lit from a streetlight ten yards away, golden and strong and somehow broken in the darkness. He is like a gladiator and a lost little boy at once. I want to reach out and touch him, brush his hair away from his eyes, kiss him on the forehead and tell him everything is going to be alright, tell him how much I miss him, how much I still love him, how his love is keeping me alive even as a ghost. But I can’t. I didn’t even have hands. “That thing with my girlfriend dying…it broke me. I am broken.”
“I heard,” she says, watching him. “About her, I mean. You don’t have to say it.”
“You did?” he asks, probably waiting for the usual overdramatic Grief Groupie reaction. Instead she just nods.
“I don’t need to know the whole story. But I’ve lost people, too, and I…understand.”
“You do? Well, I just…I can’t…”
She takes a breath, then his hand. Places it on her other wrist with all the care in the world. At his touch, a shiver runs through her, and she grows dizzy. And I think of how high humans can fly, when they are simply touched by the ones they adore. Young love: this is the apex of the universe. And here it is, right in front of me.
“Do you feel this scar on my wrist?” she asks, and he nods. “In second I grade I climbed a tree in my backyard. God, I loved that house. I can still picture it – I can still smell the grout when they replaced the carpet in the Florida room with this ugly white marble. Anyway, a branch snapped, and I fell and broke my wrist. Shattered it, actually. That’s where this scar is from – the surgery. And could you guess what? They fixed me.” She swallows and wonders if she is going too far, too soon. “Broken things can be fixed, Cooper. All it takes is a little time.”
He just stares at her, tears in his eyes. And all over again I am blown away by just how much I love him – so much more today than yesterday.
He opens his mouth and then closes it again. For a moment I forget Lily is there, forget the love of my life is moving on, and just want to touch him, to be alive, to be allowed to love him again.
And then they are kissing, and I am flying, leaving them as they are, caught somewhere between jump-for-joy ecstasy that Cooper is in good hands, and the most ancient sadness the world has ever known that those hands are not mine. Cooper is going to get through the winter of Summer. He is moving on, and I have never felt more alone.