Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

A handprint on the glass. Much like a hand extended, as if in welcome. As if to beckon, to speak. Not just to send me forth on my own— (come with me) —but to join you on your journey.

I cast a glance over my shoulder, back into the parlor and at the darkened corner of the room. Half expecting to see you standing there, Allison. It was madness, I confess.

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

This opened up a passageway in my mind, one in which other-Aaron functioned as a sort of de facto guide, my personal Virgil, and together we wound through the spiral of your past, and I could smell the scorched brimstone of your obsession as both other-Aaron and I pursued some non-specific figure into the black.

And there are places in town where you can exist along two timelines at once. Like, you could be standing on a street corner but also somewhere else in the world at that exact same moment. Sometimes you can see or hear yourself talking through one of those rips in the fabric of the universe.

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

There were three chandeliers up there now, rotating like a— (Great Cosmic Clock)

I am everywhere at once, everywhere this other-me goes. Because we haunt ourselves.

Come with me. This time, we leave this world together.