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.

It was your darkness that made me fall in love with you,

It doesn’t occur to most people when you meet the person with whom you wish to spend the rest of your life that, at some point, one of you will leave. Sure, everyone knows this on a practical level—everyone dies, no one lives forever—but no one looks their spouse in the eye on the night of their wedding and actually hears the ticking of that clock. Its sound is buried far beneath the flash and glamour of what we think our futures hold for us. But it’s there; don’t be fooled. It ticks for all of us.

But I knew better. I knew you better.

I watched all of these simple contrivances—things I had observed you to do innumerable times before—without so much as an inkling that all the while, that great and terrible cosmic clock was winding down, tick, tick, tick, mercilessly close to coming to a full stop on our time together in this life.

People put locks on things when they want to keep them safe. People put locks on things when they don’t want other people to see what they’re hiding inside.

I felt like a piece of uranium radiating poison into the atmosphere.

I was losing my mind without you, Allison. Because that’s what grief does. It robs us of a part of ourselves, leaving a crater of madness and irrationality in its place.

My mind was a never-ending loop of alternate possibilities, of planes of existence where I had gone with you and you had survived, those other versions of us still living happily in the blissful ignorance of my grief.

In my dreams, I was constantly pursuing you

And as bad as these nightmares were, it was worse to awaken and realize you were gone in real life.

Keep active. Grief hates a moving target.”

woman I believed you to be—the cerebral, pragmatic, compassionate woman with whom I was already beginning to fall in love.

Powerful

Once you open this you’ll never be able to unopen it. I opened it.

Aaron vs aaron - poor guy

You had a streak inside you that burned brightly whenever you witnessed some injustice, especially if it was perpetrated against a young girl at the hands of some perceived asshole.

“You want to know what I think, Mr. Decker?” “Yes, of course.” “I think you’re looking for something that isn’t there, son. You’re missing your wife and trying to hold on to something.”

“It’s good for them to haunt you in the beginning. It’s how we grieve. It’s how we get through it without them.”

“But after a time, we must let them go. They need to rest and we need to move on. Do you see?”

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

Maybe you’ve got a split personality, like in the movies. I’m being playful, can you tell?

“After we spoke, I read about what happened to your wife. The guy who did that to her killed himself, too. You got no answers because that madman took all the answers with him when he blew his brains out. So, now you’re trying to find answers elsewhere. Well, Mr. Decker, it just don’t work that way.”

You once said to me that you and I existed outside this plane, where space and time were wound into a ball and not in a straight line. We would always be together because we had always been together. We were acting out all our moments simultaneously right now.

Ghosts, you had told me, were time travelers not bound by the here and now.

agreed to take you in any form, in any ghostly condition, that you might wish to appear to me. It didn’t matter.

My grief was so palpable in that moment that my entire body began to tremble and I thought it possible that I might just break apart and crumble to the carpet in broken shards of crockery, a powdery heap that had once been a person, which only you, in your spectral majesty, might reshape into something even more exquisite and true.

pitched the filter of my cigarette into the yard, lit another, and contemplated smoking the entire pack. If it was possible to smoke yourself to death in one sitting, I would have tried it then.

I could see the similarities in your features—delicate, almost fragile, and emboldened by an innate brazenness that made you (and her) look almost dangerous. It was the way nature sometimes makes beautiful things poisonous.

“When you spend so much of your life sifting through dark and terrible things, you give those things the power to become real. The ghosts don’t leave you alone.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in darkness, Aaron, so much so that I’ve churned it up and stirred it to the surface and made it this real, tangible thing. It lives alongside me.

It moves when I move.

of actually moving forward with my life instead of moving backward and creeping through your bleak, hopeless hunting ground,

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.

There’s a man made up of poison gas who lives in an abandoned castle. He’ll get inside your skull and drive you mad.

The rain had stopped for now, but the evening sky was a tumult of aggressive-looking thunderheads swirling in a soupy miasma above the treetops.

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.

Because, sometimes, books are therapy.