Forty years.
It has been exactly forty years—and three minutes and thirty-two seconds and counting if I should be more specific—since that terrible night happened, but to me, there seemed to be no difference. I didn't feel any different. I wasn't even sure if I should. I mean, forty years! That sounded like such a long time, didn't it?
Weren't people supposed to be changing with time and not just watching it go by? Though I wasn't sure if I still had that capability. To change, I mean. Because honestly, that night—that night that I have been trying to banish from the recesses of my memory but failing miserably anyway—felt like it only happened yesterday. I feel like I'm literally stuck in a time zone that definitely didn't welcome me.
I breathed in the heavy air and took a sweeping glance at my surroundings—a subconscious habit I have grown over the last four decades. If I had stayed the same all these years, well apparently, everything else hadn't.
What used to be fields of wild, green grass and expanses of clear blue skies were now grey, solid, inanimate structures that shamelessly replaced the beauty this place used to possess. Widened roads. Street lights. Steel skyscrapers. Glass buildings. Iron towers… These were alien to me. Disconnected. I've never felt so lost yet I knew this was still the same town—now a city—where I was born and grew up in.
Crystalville.
The modernity and development before my eyes were indeed something to be awed with—I have read all about this in one of my father's Marketing and Strategies books that wrote about glimpses of the "very promising" future. Technology, high-end establishments, expensive cars, smoky sky, all these were indeed mentioned, and I found that those stuff I thought were pure bullshit might actually be true. In fact, they were already here and weren't going away.
Regardless, I find that I preferred things the way they were…back when the night could still be peaceful and the air was still calm and clean, when the sky was still open and shared the million twinkles of the stars with anyone who wanted to make a hundred wishes. Back when dreams were far simpler and people's clothing actually covered ninety-five percent of one's body, not the other way around.
Back when I still had everything that I wanted.
Back when I was still alive.
I let out a gust of air and started walking aimlessly, along the now-paved road. If anyone had told me before that ghosts had moments, too, I would have laughed in their face and told them to back the hell off. Weird people annoyed the crap out of me. But now that I was having a moment myself, laughing didn't seem like a good idea anymore. Ghosts did have moments, and I was the living proof of that. Oh, wait, I was already dead. So maybe I was the dead proof of that.
I continued ambling along the sidewalk, not really interested in the busybodies that brushed past—or rather, through—me. If my sense of time was still working, I'd say it was already past seven AM. The temporary quiet earlier was, indeed, only temporary, and now I had to endure yet another day of trying to tune out the ridiculously annoying buzz in my head that was the noise of the busy world around me. I've gotten pretty good at it, actually, but it didn't give me any relief. What I wanted—needed—right now wasn't some petty skill such as pretending to be deaf. I needed—
"Oops, sorry," a girl in a familiar school uniform jogged past me to keep up with the rest of the pedestrians crossing the street. I stopped dead in my tracks. (Hah! Dead in my tracks.) The cars have already stopped and were waiting for the light to turn green, but I stayed rooted to the spot, one thought playing over and over inside my head. Taunting me. Filling me with hope. Hope which could crush me later if I was wrong, but still, I had nothing more to lose. Right? So I held on to that hope and let it wash over me.
She did not walk right through me, that girl. I repeat, she did not walk right through me. And that only meant one thing. She saw me. She sensed me. She acknowledged my presence. She fucking saw me! And hell if I was going to let her get away.
My eyes hurriedly scanned the crowd coming and going and, my initial shock fading and my ghostly motor capabilities finally returning. Then I sprinted towards the girl when I spotted her, never letting her out of my sight. Boo! I was tempted to whisper the word in her ear but that might prompt her to run away scared shitless, and I didn't want that. I might not find someone like her again, and I would only have myself to blame if I lost her. So I kept my ghostly puns to myself and effortlessly kept up with her light, fast steps.
I have yet to see her face but, by the way the hairs on her nape stood to attention as I maintained my nearness, I knew she felt me, was aware of me. But she didn't look back, just kept walking, and walking, and walking...until she abruptly stopped in front of a very familiar gate and let out a very deep sigh.
Then she turned around, her brown, tired eyes locking with mine.
Holy shit.
If my heart were still beating, it would have been pounding a crazy rhythm inside my chest about now. I knew it! She was the one I've been looking for! All these years I had tried to convince myself that I shouldn't lose hope, that there would be someone out there who could possibly, actually help me. I thought I was optimistic enough, and I'd been. I set out, as far as my invisible ghostly boundary line would allow me each and every day, to find among the living that one person who would see me, and then look straight into my eyes, not through them.
That positivity, though, only lasted until the fourth year. Yet it was coming back with a vengeance now, the onslaught of emotions threatening to burst from my chest at all the possibilities this could mean. But whatever happens now, that would totally be up to whoever was out there watching over me.
I clenched my hands into tight fists. With a shaky breath and with the prickly feeling of hope surging through my transparent heart, I took a purposeful step forward, towards her. It pleased me that she didn't step back. Didn't even flinch.
We would get along very well, I know it.
"Help me," I said, the echo of my voice resonating around us, cold and emotionless. Though I was anything but.
The girl's mouth formed into a thin line, her stance hardening, eyes narrowing, yet the beating pulse on her neck gave away what she was truly feeling. Not as brave and unaffected as she would like to project. She was scared, I knew she was.
So it shouldn't have felt like I've been shot in my chest when the word came out of her mouth in a tight voice that bordered no argument. "No." Then just like that, she turned around and continued walking in that brisk, indifferent pace towards the gates of Saint Joseph University as if she didn't just take away from me the final straw that held my sanity together.
What a heartless girl. So much like someone I used to know.
Then again, I wasn't the kind of guy who easily took 'no' for an answer. Especially not when I've come this far, this close, to finally getting what I needed. I didn't take my eyes off the heartless girl's back until she vanished into the sea of students, memorizing the color of her hair, the tightness in her shoulders, the stiff way she held her head as if she had an invisible Velcro strapped to her neck, and the rest of her profile.
No, huh? Fine, then. If asking nicely didn't work on her, there were other ideas to make her change her mind. And I knew just what to do next.
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