Opalescence

She doesn’t see you. You’re terrified of what she’ll say when she does, how she’ll react. You stay just out of focus, hanging in doorways or behind curtains, and while you can’t inhabit the space she does – not directly – through every reflection in the house you see her. She’s as beautiful as she was when you two were children.

Beautiful, long hair, flawless skin, a crooked smile that’s a little weathered but still just as sharp. Deep eyes that match your own, glittering in the dim light. You haven’t seen them up close in a while, living in the reflected backward world you’re in, but sometimes by candlelight you’ll look into your own and imagine they’re hers. Imagine she can see you, will smile and caress your face, ruffle your hair.

It's late, far past her bedtime, but lingering in her room and peering through the hazy reflections of her window, she doesn’t seem to be sleeping. There’s no movement at all. You drift lazily through the house, looking through silverware and mirrors and light fixtures for anything at all, until you catch a hazy shuddering in the TV.

Modern matte screens make it harder to see, but you can see the figure of her, huddled on the couch, and you can practically hear her sobs. Instinctively, your hand flits to your pocket, drawing out your phone – the one grateful thing the world of the dead gave you – and call.

Like a far-off echo underwater, you hear the gentle chiming until, after a few minutes, the call connects and you hear a sniffling huff. “H… hello?”

“Hey,” you smile, cradling the phone close to catch your voice. “You awake?”

She laughs, watery and sad, and making a sound like she’s wiping her nose. “I answered, didn’t I? Dork.”

“I know,” you laugh, sitting on the couch where she’d be. Your body overlaid in the same spot as her reflection. “You okay?”

There’s a long pause and you hear a softly choked sob. “Your connection is shit,” she sniffles. “Why do you live in a house lined with lead?”

“Maybe it’s your connection,” you tease, folding your legs up under you, like you always would when you’d listen to her as kids. “What’s going on, sis?”

“… it’s so fucking hard.”

“Anything specific?”

“Kind of?” She groans and you can see movement in the reflection. You know the gesture, she’s fiddling with a hair tie at her wrist, finger looping around and around and around, toying with the idea of pulling her hair up but never committing. “It’s that girl again. The one… you know.”

You sputter out a sigh. You know. “Yeah.”

“She just… it sucks! It all fucking sucks. You know? Like, every day I have to see her and get close and I just…”

 Can’t get too close. You stick your hand out, roughly where she’d be, and in the cloying cold of the afterlife, you can feel her warmth leeching through, like an afterimage of a person, a heat mirage. You swipe at it impotently and sigh. “I know the feeling.”

“Do you?” she laughs, a little incredulous. “You’re… you’re so put together! You seem like you have it all figured out and I’m just… I don’t know. Spinning my wheels. I’m stuck and I don’t know what to do. Just dealing with hopeless crushes.”

“She’d be stupid not to listen,” you whisper softly. “She’d be really fucking dumb to turn down someone like you.”

“But she does, again and again, and there’s that fucking… dumb boy, and-!” She screams into a pillow and you wince hard, holding the phone away from your face. Your cheeks are burning now and you feel a gnawing in your chest. That boiling in your heart that gets harder to push down every day. “I-I’m sorry,” she sighs, and you can hear her starting to wind down. “I shouldn’t just… push this shit on you all the time.”

“I’m here to listen,” you respond earnestly. “It’s what I’m here for.” All you’re here for.

“Still, I should ask about your life, or how you’ve been or…?”

“It’s really nothing special,” you promise with a laugh. “Just kicking around. Not really doing much.”

For a moment you consider. This tether to the living world, this lifeline between you two. You could just spill your guts. At this point, what, physically, do you have to lose? You’re here forever. You’re haunting the remains of your old family home, watching your sister pine over people who don’t deserve her, for the rest of time. At least until she dies, maybe longer. You have your phone. You have her voice. You could make your time bearable, maybe steer her along the right direction. Hell, you could maybe try to see each other through the glass, press hands together between the mirror and try to feel her warmth for real. You could try possession, you could enjoy time together. You love her so much that it bubbles up inside of you like a geyser threatening to rip your body apart.

You open your mouth. You’re going to tell her you love her. You want her to know, she deserves to know that someone loves her the way she wants to be loved, can be the thing she craves so desperately, she deserves-

“Thank you, sis,” she whispers into the receiver. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

And all at once, reality comes back in like the tide.

She deserves touch. She deserves someone real. She deserves someone not fucking dead. She deserves someone to love her for the rest of her living days to hold her close and tell her that she’s loved to the point of suffocating obsession because she’s like a glittering, priceless gemstone the likes of which this world has never seen and you’re-

You’re…

It isn’t self-deprecating. You’re literally nothing. Insubstantial. Weightless. You wave your hand through her form one last time and give a quiet sigh.

“Of course. I’m going to be here forever. You can’t get rid of me.”

She laughs at that, and it’s beautiful and sonorous. “Promise?”

It’s amazing how the throat can constrict without a physical form. You look in the reflection of the TV, seeing the two of you overlaid like chromatic aberration, two forms taking up a single space, worlds apart, never destined to touch. You were never meant to touch her. And now, you never will.