When the light is soft in early morning, combing through the blinds and striping the bedroom floor, parts of me may be reflected. I am caught in the sun like a gossamer cloth, but momentarily. She lays in a pooling white blanket, the fabric rising and falling with the tide of her breath. Closer, I can see life blush in her cheeks and wish I could feel the warmth of the blood just beneath the skin. She is a vision, a hand painted portrait I would try in vain to replicate if I had the means. 

I hear her breath gently change and her eyes blink open. For a moment, she gazes up at me, and as the world settles in and takes shape around her, she is staring straight through my chest. So goes the morning. 

With a stretch and a yawn, Bea rises from bed. She swings her feet over the edge of the mattress and sits for a moment, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She reaches for her phone in the nightstand, which alights with a message, “Still on for Friday? I’ll bring a bottle of bubbly to celebrate one month in your own place!”. Bea smiles and types out, “Sounds great, might make you help put up the last bits of my décor though”.

The doorbell rings. 

A guest has arrived.

Bea rushes to the door and throws it open, “Hello!” She throws her arms around Emma’s neck who totters backward and laughs, “I’m going to drop the champagne!” They unravel and Bea ushers her in and closes the door. 

“You can leave your things here, I’ll just run to the kitchen to get us some glasses.” Bea scoops the bottle from Emma’s hand and makes her way back down the carpeted hall. As she crosses the threshold into the kitchen a coolness envelopes her. 

“God, did you feel that?” Bea calls down the hall, looking around, “I’ve been getting chills out of nowhere, I hope there’s not a cracked window letting a draft in”.

“No, I didn’t feel anything” Emma replies, peeling off her pea coat and hanging it over the banister at the foot of the stairs. 

“Odd.” 

She wanders to the living room where Emma is settling in and sneaks a bite of the cheese from the charcuterie board. Both girls curl up with their feet beneath them. Sitting similarly, as sisters often do. Emma fiddles with the cork on the champagne and Bea strikes a match and lights a candle on the low table which fills the room with a scent of cedar and cinnamon. 

I do love to meet the family. I hope they don’t mind if I settle in for a while. 

A few hours later the sisters are warm and grinning, the assortment of meat and cheeses has been picked over and the candle has burned down. 

“So, when are we going to talk about this boy you’re going out with next weekend?” Emma teases. 

Who? A boy? 

The candle snuffs out, leaving a curl of smoke. The girls gasp, lock eyes and then burst into laughter. “Well, that was strange!” says Emma. 

“This house is strange.” Bea shakes her head, “But yes, this is the same one I’ve been telling you about for so long, the one I met last year. We’ve been friends, but I always wondered about something more.” She looks down and smiles, running her finger around the rim of her glass. “Finally, I told him that maybe he should take me out to dinner, and he said okay, so that’s what we’re going to do. I’m a bit of a nervous wreck about it, but I’m excited.” 

“Oh, Bea, I’m so proud of you. Now let’s not get our hopes too high, but you’ll have to tell me every detail afterwards.” Emma reaches across the couch cushion between them and gently squeezes her sister’s hand. 

I cannot listen. 

Later that night, the girls part ways, Emma out the front door and Bea softly swaying down the hall to bed. 

Sweet one, go rest. I’ll keep you safe.  

After a groggy morning, Bea emerges from her bedroom. She goes to the front door, eyebrows knitted together and checks the lock, jiggling the handle. She breathes a sigh of relief. 

Later in the day she wanders into the kitchen and opens the cabinet, her hand resting on the box of tea on the top shelf. Her eye catches on sunlight playing off of swirling steam and she looks over to see a cup of her favorite tea, made with a splash of milk and half a spoonful of sugar, just how she likes it. She pulls her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and types a message out to Emma, “That champagne must have gone to my head. I just went to make a cup of tea and must have forgotten that I made one already. Bizarre. I guess I know myself well.” 

I want to greet her at the end of the day and send her off in the morning. Perhaps she’ll feel the rhythm, know me as the last thing she embraces before she leaves and the first thing to meet her upon arrival. 

Bea wonders about the chill that envelops her by the front door so often now.  She writes a note to call a handyman to come check the seal on her front door and posts it on the fridge. 

I hear her in the bathroom at the end of the hall, water running. I would never dare go in. I recall faint memories of what it meant to have skin under a warm shower. Losing oneself in the rivulets of water, like melting. What I would trade to stand in there with her, and not get lost in the steam. 

I stay in the living room and adjust a picture frame. 

The doorbell rings. 

The guest has arrived. I am already disgusted by him. 

In a whirlwind of excitement and chatter, Bea is whisked out the door by two strong arms. The door slams and her laugh echoes in the hall, in the kitchen, in the living room. The emptiness grows heavy. 

Why must he take you from me? 

How dare he take you from me?! 

A picture falls from its hook and the glass shatters on the ground. The potted lily on the kitchen table suffocates, its leaves rapidly turning wrinkled and brown. Four long scratches like fingernails are carved into the windowpane. 

A few hours later, a key in the lock jiggles and the couple comes bursting in, red cheeked from the autumn chill outside and laughter. They don’t notice the disturbance in décor.

“I’m going to run to the restroom,” Bea giggles and points, “the living room is just there, make yourself comfortable.” She scampers off down the hall, dropping her shoes and coat on the floor as she goes. 

So, this is the creep I’ve heard so much about. Let me get a good look at him. 

Bea’s date is making himself comfortable on the couch, feeling the cushions, looking around. Suddenly, with a sharp wind blowing in he is frigid, and there is a weight heavy on his chest. He gasps, and in the headlights of a car going by in the street, two faint eyes are reflected, hanging in the air above him. They bore into him like nothing he has ever seen, filled with other worldly anger. His throat is closing and one hand clutches at his neck, the other scratches at the couch cushions. He hears a distant growl, and not quite a voice, but a feeling like the air is trying to enter his ears, infect his brain, and it carries on it a promise, a threat. 

In the distance, feet come padding down the corridor. And suddenly the sensation is gone, vanished. He gasps for air, doubling over on the couch, clutching his throat. Bea pops into the room and stops in her tracks, then rushes toward him. “Oh my god, are you alright?” She reaches for him, but he is up off the couch backing away from her. He stares at her with wide eyes and shakes his head. “I – I need to go. I need to go.” Bea trails after him with her arms extended, “Go? Why? What happened?” But he grabs his coat from where it lays on the couch and is already making his way quickly to the door. “Please don’t go, just come sit, tell me what happ- ”, in a moment the door is opened and then slams a mere few inches from her face. 

Bea resides in a puddle of her own tears and woes, for the morning at least. Lost in a pile of blankets, the tv running in the background, flashing with bright images of reality show reruns. Her face is like a full moon, pale and illuminated, reflecting the glow of her phone as she types every thought out to Emma. Where it all went wrong. Perhaps she was too forward inviting him inside. Perhaps he had a panic attack, and it was all her doing. 

She wanders about the house, ghoulish, trailing her blanket across the floorboards behind her. 

I wish I could call to her, “Here! I am here! The one you are looking for, the one who adores you, I am right here”.

Bea spends the day in a fog. A cup of tea, made just the way she likes it, sits on the kitchen counter getting cold. She walks through a cool cloud and does not shudder. She reads a book sideways on the couch and does not notice the floorboards creak or the picture frames tilt. 

Bea arrives home from work in the early evening and goes to her bedroom. Her phone died halfway through the day, so she plugs it in next to her bed. She sits on the edge of her bed, poised, face down at the phone. It illuminates, without a text from the boy. She inhales deeply and types, “Hey, sorry things got weird the other night. But I had a really lovely time otherwise, should we try a re-do sometime?” 

Not long after, a buzz and in a bubble: “Bea, you’re great. But I don’t think this is going to work for me right now. Best of luck to you.” 

Bea lays back on the bed, sinking into her thick duvet, and stares at the white ceiling. She sighs. 

I watch her lying in bed. Not like she does when she’s sleeping, but more blank. She stares at the ceiling, the way she stares at me, like she is piercing through it. Through the roof and the shingles, past the swallows on the tree branches above, beyond the clouds that threaten rain, and into the vacuum of space. 

If I had a heart, it would have sunk to the floor. If I had breath, it would have escaped my throat. Instead, I melt into the wall.

To know love beyond the grave is to know a pain beyond what the human body can hold. I know I cannot have her, cannot hold her. When my arms do not cradle but chill her to the bone, when my voice is lost on the wind and my heartbeat cannot calm her because it is silent. 

I know all of these things to be true and yet I cannot depart from her. 

And if I must find joy in her love for another, find solace in her drinking tea on her own, find comfort in checking the locks on the door. So be it. 

For somehow, she haunts me.