Convergence

Spirits are regarded as evil, only negative traces of whatever they used to be. People fear spirits, hunt ghosts, and tell stories about them as if they were passive monsters. The truth is, most aren’t malicious, hateful, or evil. They’re just alone. Forever. Or at least until they move on, or somehow become whole again. Because isn’t that why they are still hanging around? But the longer they wait, the more time weighs down heavily, dragging them from behind into further and further isolation, wearing them down to whispers in the air that no one can remember. The only thing that can stop their decline into meaninglessness is remembering who they once were, when they were trying to achieve their purpose while alive. Only then can they finally move on. Until then, they don’t remember their past. They don’t know why they exist, or who they are. All they know is the grueling loneliness that they sense may never end. Nobody wants to be alone, not completely. Nobody wants to wake up and know that there is not a soul out there who knows your name: nobody out there can hear you, see you, nor touch you. 

Arden’s hair was a waterfall of glossy black locks. Her skin was pale; a translucent delicacy. She had a thin, bony frame. Her eyes were so dark that you couldn’t see her pupils if you tried – pools of a new moon so deep you might be able to swim in them, and yet one star in each eye seeming to gleam as if she were still living, breathing, and dreaming, as if she still had hope. She was unseen.

Elijah Saint Peters was the leftovers of a half-eaten man. Memories and scars had chipped away at him until he was just a breathing skeleton. Elijah worked part-time as a paper salesman. He had once known love, but had lost it all at once, in a single blighted afternoon. His face harbored jutting features, wilted pupils in empty eyes. Maybe long ago, he had been a strong, burly man with a twinkle in his eye, but now Elijah was old, on the edge of life, his cheeks hollow, sharp bones like knives under a thin cloth, back hunched.

Elijah soaked in his isolation each afternoon as he had to walk through woods, after work, to his lonely brick cottage with a chimney too small to be of any use. Leaving the town felt like he was glimpsing the afterlife, or was it an escape into the grief that had consumed him since he had lost it all, so very long ago, on that one flame-engulfed day? Amongst his possessions, he had also lost his dignity, his happiness, and most importantly, his daughter. His daughter, who had not yet seen six years, had been swallowed by a flaming house as easily as if she were a cracker.

After it all, Elijah removed himself from the outside world and was thrown into an inner world of pain, abrading and upbraiding his spirit until he practically buckled under the weight of grief that his body had lost the strength to uphold, and he felt the unquenchable desire to disappear forever. Opportunities he had to heal were ignored – loyalty to his daughter meant that Elijah sought only to live in the past.

The child-shaped hole in Elijah’s soul left him with no incentive to create new imprints in the world, and once he had barely managed to lay a paper-thin bandage over his hollow heart, he maintained composure by being as socially unremarkable as possible. Nobody ever noticed when he missed work and, in that sense, his invisibility made him more of a spirit than a man. Some wondered: “Was Elijah here today? Or did he ask to miss tomorrow?”

One early evening in spring, Elijah stepped into the overgrown grass surrounding his cottage and lay down for a spell – leaving an imprint, feeding off of his own solitude, wishing more than anything to be absorbed into the towering trees that did not cry over his insignificance.

But his tranquility was interrupted with a roar. A hollow vacuum that warped the silence into a bell shape. It was a lack of sound that suggested a presence.  He got up.

After scouring the area once, twice, Elijah returned to his cabin, frustrated. However, a few minutes later, after another glance around at his surroundings, Elijah saw a fleeting silhouette of an indistinguishable something. He stood and crept toward the figure hidden within the shadows of the trees. 

Arden was used to being alone, and, being like all other spirits, was used to knowing that the end may never come. Her past was a blank though: she didn’t know who she was or where she came from. She simply spent her time wandering around. She watched little girl babies being rocked back and forth. She watched friends (had she known them once?) play hopscotch, watched kids fighting on the playground, watched first romances and first kisses, watched happiness and livelihood unfold before her very eyes. But Arden didn’t let herself wish for it. Being but a spirit of a child, Arden had the wisdom of an old man, but the experience of a newborn. 

Arden liked to play a game with herself when she started to feel lonely. She would watch the mothers and fathers gazing lovingly at their children, pretending they weren’t staring through her, but rather at her. She would run by the side of the playing children, laugh with the groups of adults telling jokes she couldn’t understand, insert herself into every family she could, just to convince herself that her own solitude was simply a figment of imagination.

But in these woods, there were no families to pretend with, no crowds to blend into. And for the first time, in that secluded spread of trees, Arden knew she had nobody. For the first time, Arden let herself be lonely, allowed it to fully seep in.

She saw the small clearing, and the small brick cottage with the chimney too small to be of any use. Stricken by curiosity, Arden looked at it, wondering who was inside. She stayed near the edge of the trees. 

In that moment, as Arden’s eyes met another’s, peering out from the window, a tidal wave of memories flooded through her, flowing through her veins, and finally, she remembered. 

She remembered the smoke choking at her lungs, tearing at her heart. 

She felt her throat burning as she gasped for air. 

She heard the sound of choking out her final scream.

Elijah was torn between disbelief and ecstasy. He couldn’t bear to believe it. He saw flames too, and remembered the way that the smoke had infiltrated his every pore as it likewise had obscured her from him forever.

Flashes of flame again, voices, their tones themselves burned away, blades tearing through every fiber of his being, the heat chasing his cold sweat into evaporated dryness.  

Arden stepped closer to the house and her memories shifted from the fire to what the fire had destroyed:  memories of laughter, bedtime stories, midnight snacks, being loved. Love, thick and soothing, returned. Yet how unlike what she’d been searching for it was! Arden knew she would never feel alone again.

Slowly, Arden began to feel warmth return to her body. She felt missing pieces of her memory restored. She felt bruises and cuts finally breathe to heal. 

As for Elijah, his memories hadn’t been repressed, or missing, or incomplete, but rather, his emotions had drained away. Now, he felt himself feeling her laughter rather than hearing it, and letting the weight of sorrow crush him into nothing, so that feeling and sentiment might build him up again. And for the first time in what felt like forever, Elijah felt complete.

From two separate halves to two halves of a whole: the entirety of the girl was a spirit, and the entirety of the man was a shell, and together they merged and let themselves complete each other.

Elijah held Arden close to his chest. He caressed her with a fatherly touch that the girl could finally remember. He stared into the abyss of her eyes, he watched the fading afternoon light reflect on her glossy hair, seeing his own reflection in both. Elijah’s old bones ached, and Arden’s soul longed to be free, but neither cared. Arden wasn’t playing pretend anymore. Elijah wasn’t escaping anymore. Together, they felt themselves become complete, and together, they finally let themselves disappear.