Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

You see, part of me had blinked out of existence right along with you—another consequence of the marital union—and what was left in the aftermath only retained the barest essence of a human being.

I’m of the opinion that when it comes to secrets, there is no end to what we don’t know about a person. Even the person who sleeps next to us and shares our lives.

No one thinks when they first meet a person that there is some cosmic clock counting down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until you will stop knowing each other.

Because that’s what grief does. It robs us of a part of ourselves, leaving a crater of madness and irrationality in its place.

“I just want to make sure you do things. And don’t just stay bottled up in this house. At least go for a walk around the neighborhood or something. Get some sun on your face. Anything, Aaron. Keep active. Grief hates a moving target.”

There is a word in Japanese, ukiyo, which has no English equivalent. In Japanese, it means “the floating world,” and in essence it refers to living in the here-and-now with complete and utter detachment from the rest of the surrounding universe.

“We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”

In my excitement, I never stopped to wonder why, given the depth of your research and all your copious notes, James de Campo’s name never once appeared anywhere in your file.

We will always be together because we have always been together. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.