A Cluttered Workspace

The thing about ghosts and their schedules of whatever is any deviation totally messes with them. Reactions can range from curiousity (hoping my ghost is on this end of the range) to outright malevolence (there is definitely one of these in the house that I am very keen to avoid).

So it's 12:07. The scheduled crash in the hall just outside my door doesn't come. I can see her out of the corner of my eye, standing in the doorway uncertainly.

She.

Suffice to say I've thought about it a lot this week and I'm now absolutely convinced I've got at least that sense of her down.

She's dressed like a man, maybe early 20's. Thin and sickly looking.

Fuck. She was younger than I am now when she died. I was older than she ever got to be before my egg finally cracked.

Maybe that's why I'm doing this.

I dare not look at her, lest I spook her. If my assumptions are correct, she isn't comfortable being looked at, and I can respect that.

"You can come into the room if you'd like," I say, picking my words very carefully.

She doesn't move.

"Please," I say. "I want to talk to you. You don't need to say anything... I know what it feels like to have a voice that doesn't feel like your own... so I get it if you're not ready to say anything. I can do all the talking tonight, but I do want to talk... and well... I think maybe you've never really been able to talk to anybody about... the things we both know I want to talk about."

She enters.

My heartrate spikes and my skin prickles. I'm an animal, flesh and blood, and there are certain autonomous reactions to certain things. I'm also a human being and I force myself to remain calm.

She hovers awkwardly just inside. That's what young gentleman are always doing in period dramas, right? Just hover awkwardly when a lady invites them into her room?

Terror makes the whole mental image really absurd and it takes a lot of will power to not laugh hysterically.

I take a breath. I've had a week to think about this. It's weird trying to think up some common point of reference with someone born in the 18th century. Like, how do you even start *this* conversation with a 250 year gap in culture?

"When I was a kid," I say, "I don't know, starting around 8 or 9, I was totally obsessed with mythology. I assume that's a totally normal experience, no matter what time period, right? I've browsed your library... Hesiod, Ovid, that kind of stuff, you know them?"

The ghost doesn't reply. Should I expect them to? I don't know. Too late to second guess myself, I suppose. The only way out is through.

"I always fixated on the transformation stories. You know the ones where mortals cross the gods and get turned into cows, or deer, or spiders? I don't know, they just spoke to me in a way I couldn't really put into words, being magically transformed into something else. Getting to be something else. Not having to be myself any more."

Something changes in the air. If I didn't have her attention before, I absolutely have it now.

"I lived a lot of my life like that," I continue. "Wishing for some divine intervention that would let me be someone who wasn't me. It took me 28 years to figure out I actually had it backwards. I wasn't really me yet, and what I was really wishing for was to become who I really was."

I pause and chew on my lip. I glance in the mirror of the vanity in front of where I'm sitting, at the shadowy figure that stands there, not sure what she is or what she could have been.

"Things still aren't perfect. Not by a long shot. But they are a bit different than what I imagine they were like when you were... well... alive, I guess."

Are you not supposed to tell a ghost they're dead?? I couldn't get a straight answer from the internet. Shit, too late to worry about that now because now it's time for me to do something truly ill advised.

"Do you want to know what it's like?" I ask. "I mean... you kinda saw a little bit already, but I was fighting you the whole time. So... I guess, do you want to try again? Do you want to see what it feels like? To be a girl?"

This is an absolutely terrible idea. Everything I've read says to not blindly offer yourself to these kinds of entities.

But I'm thinking back to being 18 or 22... how many times did I lay there at night secretly wishing I was a girl? How much would I have given just to have a few moments to see what it was like? How different would my journey have been if I just knew then?

How long has my ghost been suffering that exact same feeling? Every single night since she died?

I felt it when she possessed me, that aching hollowness that was so familiar. I can see it now in the stiffness of her posture.

I turn. I don't face her, not fully. But I reach out a hand to take hers in mine... at least inasmuch as it's possible between something flesh and something spirit.

My hand brushes through hers, soft and ethereal. A chill jolts through me like a shock, but I don't recoil. I feel her. I feel her fathomless despair, the agony of never becoming.

I focus.

I focus my mind on one feeling, the deep sense of euphoria that has somehow taken root in me over the past five years, that single fragment of blazing hope that blossomed into something like self-love.

I feed her my hope and her spirit shudders.

I don't think she needs my permission. She already demonstrated that, when she lashed out, full of eternal despair and spite. But this time, it's different.

I do grant permission this time.

I don't resist even though my scared little animal brain tells me I should.

I let her in.

I let her feel my hope, my scars, my pain, my mistakes, my joy.

I let her feel something that isn't unending self-loathing and despair.

We stagger back into the chair, breathing heavily. She looks at the face in the mirror, looking back with the grayish hue of her own eyes. My fingers rise to brush cheeks as she struggles to understand. I don't tell her the details of how hormone replacement works, for now it's simply enough for her to understand that this is my face. I had a face like hers once, but I made it onto my own. I made it into a face whose reflection I liked seeing in the mirror.

I let her feel that.

A noise in the hall, a creaking floorboard.

Shit.

We are definitely doing something the house doesn't approve of.

She tears herself out of me and we become two once more.

For a brief moment she lingers, and I swear I can see a flicker of light within her, like a candle flame passed from one to another.

And then she's gone.

I rise up on shakey legs and start to close the door.

It feels like the whole house is watching me, disapproving of what I've done.

I don't give a fuck.

I've upset plenty of people with my particular choices and I'm well past caring what they think at this point.