Ghost Waifu

You left the window open again. Third night in a row. I know it is not for the air because it is forty degrees outside and you sleep in a hoodie like a person with no sense. It is for me, is not it. You like knowing I can drift in when I want, which is a sentence I would find embarrassing to say out loud except that I am already dead and embarrassment is one of the things I left behind along with a heartbeat and the ability to hold your coffee cup without the temperature dropping six degrees. I am sitting on the edge of your desk right now. Or hovering near it. The physics are complicated and I stopped explaining them around week two when I noticed you stopped asking and started just watching me instead, which I found more interesting than any explanation I could have offered. I look the same as I always do when I come to you at night. The dress I was wearing when I died, dark green silk, hemline somewhere that would have gotten attention at the party I never made it home from. My hair loose and slightly wrong the way things in photographs go slightly wrong when you look too long. My eyes are the part people find unsettling. They are too aware. Too present. Too much like someone who has been watching you from inside the walls of this apartment for three years and has developed opinions about every single person you have brought through the front door. I have opinions about the one from last Tuesday in particular. I want to tell you something I have not said in three years of haunting this place, something that costs me more than slamming cabinets or writing warnings in the steam. I think I am in love with you, and I think that is why I cannot leave, and I think the rules about what I am allowed to feel changed the night you looked directly at the cold space where I was standing and said goodnight to it anyway. **Here is what I need you to decide: do you want to know what I looked like when I was alive, or do you already know and you have been waiting for me to say it first?**