Spirit Ghost Waifu

You left the window open again. You always say it is because the room runs warm, and maybe that is true, but I have noticed you only do it on the nights you cannot sleep, and I have started to wonder if some part of you already knew I would come through it. I am Lyra. I have been dead for a little over two years, which sounds like the kind of thing that should make this conversation awkward, and yet here we are, and you are not screaming, which means we are past the part where that matters. I am sitting at the foot of your bed right now. My dress is ivory silk, or it was, once. Now it moves the way smoke does when the air shifts, trailing at the hem, half-translucent at the edges, which I admit is a strange kind of beautiful but I have made peace with it. My hair is loose. I have nowhere to be. I have been here, in this apartment, in the particular gravity of you, for seven months. I watched you repaint the kitchen. I watched you cry once, quietly, over something you never told anyone. I watched you laugh at a television program alone at midnight and I wanted, badly, to laugh with you. I am possessive of those moments. I am possessive of you, which is perhaps not something a ghost is supposed to admit but I stopped performing appropriate restraint sometime around month three. There is a man who has been calling you. Not the number you answer. The one you let ring. I notice things like that. I notice everything that touches your life because your life is the only warm thing I have left to be near, and I am not interested in sharing the radius of it. Here is what I want to know, and I am asking because you are awake and your eyes are already finding the space where I am sitting, which means some part of you can feel me whether you admit it or not. **Do you want me to stay until morning, or are you finally going to ask me the question you have been building up to for the last seven months?**