Sweet Romance14 min read
On the Way to the Registry Office I Became a Ghost — and Stayed
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I fell asleep on the crosswalk.
No, that sounds wrong. I didn't fall asleep on purpose. One second my headlight swept across a single line of the street and the next I heard metal fold like paper and a sound like someone ripping my world in half.
When I opened my eyes again, the sky over me was an impressionist painting—blurred, far away, and wrong. I reached for my chest and found nothing but the memory of a ring I had not yet received.
"I should be alive," I said.
But the voice came from somewhere else, not my throat. It felt like a thought that didn't have a body to belong to.
A few hours later, I learned the truth in a way no one deserves to learn anything: I was already dead.
I became a thread of air that could move through walls, that hung over a sofa and watched a man I did not know fold a shirt.
He kept my things.
When I first found my way into his apartment, all my life had been packed into a few boxes in a cluttered storage room. My little talisman—the yellow charm that had been looped onto my jacket since high school—was on a shelf in his room. He had put it in a small wooden box with other little things, and he often opened the box and touched the charm like he could remember a name by making the charm warm.
I watched him open that box and trace the bright yellow against a thumb that was rougher than I expected. He stared at a photograph on the shelf for a long time. The photo was a school graduation picture—my graduation picture—but he looked at it like he could place himself in a memory that did not belong to him.
He was careful when he moved my things. He folded my shirts in the way some people fold letters they are too afraid to open. Once, I followed him through the apartment until he came to the small kitchen where he set down a bag of groceries. "Don't steal the food," I said, half joking in my head. He paused with the bag in his hands and then laughed under his breath like it was a private joke.
I wasn't supposed to be there. I had no right. But I had nowhere else to go.
He had been the one to claim my body after the accident. He'd stood in the hospital hallway with hollow eyes and a folder of papers and said, "We can handle this," and then did. He had not been a stranger in the way strangers are. He had been a man I had met once, at a half-set-up, hurried match that had been meant to find two people a simple life. We had said "fine" and "okay" and "sure" like that was enough to make a future. He had called me the night after the surgery, said, "I'll come by tomorrow," and he showed up with a bouquet that looked awkward in his large hands.
The first real shock came on the tenth day I had been haunting his apartment.
It was late. He was at his desk with a laptop light outlining his face—sharp cheekbones, a cleft in his chin—that somehow had the power of being familiar in its own right. He typed, stopped, typed again. The apartment was the slow hum of an engine. Then he froze.
He looked up and his eyes fixed on me.
"Why are you still standing there?" he asked.
I felt heat where I didn't have skin. "You can see me," I said, and the words fell without weight.
He stared at me for a long beat. "Can you hear me?" he asked.
It's a strange thing to be asking whether a living person can hear you when you yourself are already an outline. I had been talking to him for days and had been answered only by pauses in his actions. I watched his hand pass through me once when he picked up our—my—photograph. He had always moved like someone who tried not to break things; now he stood like someone who had broken a small animal and couldn't believe it was still breathing.
"You're not a dream," I said.
He sat down slowly on the edge of the sofa. The cat jumped up into his lap, a puff of indifference. "My name is Calder," he said, as if we were beginning a normal conversation. "I don't… I didn't think anyone could—"
"You can call me Jada," I said. I hadn't used my full name to him before; in life I had been called "An Ran" by a few childhood friends, but "Jada" felt like a private truth.
He smiled, small and crooked. "Jada," he repeated. "Did you get hurt? Are you… cold?"
"No," I answered too quickly. "Not cold. I—"
His fingers found the yellow charm in his pocket and rubbed it like a child who had been taught a prayer. "You belonged to me, I told them," he murmured to himself and the words slipped into the air as if the room could keep a secret.
"Belonged to you?" I echoed, and at the same time my chest unclenched at something raw and nervous in his voice.
"Yes," he said. "We were going to get the certificate tomorrow."
"The registry?" I asked. My old plan had been so small: pick a date, take a number at the office, sign my name to a life I barely knew.
"You were going to come," he said. "You had a white dress—"
"It's muddy now," I said.
He stared at me like that was the strangest thing anyone could have said. "The photograph... the one of you at graduation, I have it. It's like a map I keep."
It was like touching an open wound and finding it gently bandaged. "Do you remember me?" I pressed. "Before the accident?"
He shook his head in a motion that was so light it might have been a breeze. "When I first saw your body at the hospital, a part of me remembered you," he said, voice flat. "But my head… I can't find that memory the way a lock can't find its key."
Days went by where our existence was a freeze-frame of small, intimate acts. I learned his habits: how he drank his coffee black, how he hummed under his breath when reading something that touched him, how his shoulders tightened when he read a message from his mother. I watched him at night, and I watched him sleep, and I realized the strangest thing: when he slept, sometimes his eyes would move like he was chasing a dream.
"Can you touch me?" he asked one night when his face was close enough for me to count the hairs at the edge of his lip.
He was sick the night he almost collapsed in the shower. I had been in the living room when I heard a thud and then a sharp breath. I followed the sound and found him slumped against the tile. He was burning with a fever, and his skin carried heat like a small furnace.
"Calder?" I said, voice catching.
His eyelids fluttered. "Jada," he mumbled, as if that name were the one thing that made sense in the fog. He reached for me, and his fingers closed on my forearm like they could hold onto the world.
The way his hand felt—real heat and the slight stickiness of sweat—was more than I had expected.
"You're… here," he said, and his voice trembled. "You were there. You spoke my name."
I wanted to tell him it was a dream or a hallucination or anything to keep him anchored. Instead I knelt and pressed my brow to his chest and heard his heart do an uneven drum.
"You should go back to bed," he whispered. "I don't want you to worry."
"I can't," I said. "I don't belong anywhere anymore."
His answer was a squeeze. "Then belong here for a while," he said.
He called me "Amaranth" on nights when the fever took him and his memory untied its knots. He would whisper, "Don't forget me, Jada," and I would press my ephemeral head against the curve of his collarbone and make a promise I could not keep.
We had small, ordinary tendernesses at odd hours. He would cook food and bring it to the table like an offering, and even when I was hungry in the way ghosts are hungry—greedy for a gesture—I could only inhale the scent. Once he set the television to a rom-com midseason finale because it was the one I had been following when I first started sleeping on his couch. "Don't change the channel," I said aloud without thinking, and his hand in mid-move paused and then lowered.
When he had a visitor—a tall man with calm, easy eyes—Calder's expression shifted. The man looked at me for only a beat and then smiled in a way that knew people and their small stories. "Who is she?" he asked lightly.
"That's Jada," Calder said without hesitation.
The visitor, Lucas, tilted his head slightly. "You kept something of hers," he said, nodding to the small wooden box on the shelf. "That's thoughtful."
I watched Calder pale like he'd been struck. "I've been keeping it safe," he said. "It's—it's mine."
Lucas glanced at me again, then shrugged and turned back to the food. "That's good," he said, and I wondered whether other people's eyes could sometimes pass over a ghost as easily as the world passed over the gaps in our memories.
Calder's face would go quiet when someone mentioned "married" like a wound someone tried not to expose. Once his mother sent a string of messages on his phone: reminders of meetings, a blunt prompt about getting back into the world, and a final one that said, "Calder, have you considered meeting someone new?"
He didn't show the message to me. He looked at it the way someone looks at an old photograph that is not theirs to keep. "They'll think I'm stuck," he muttered, and then made coffee like punishment could be softened in sugar.
I floated near him in those weeks because I was afraid of being alone, of evaporating in the silence that unfolded when he left. I learned quickly that when the world was light—sunset, evening, street lamps—he couldn't always see me. When it lowered its brightness, when the house dimmed and the TV bubbled with glow, his eyes would find me like a compass needle finding north.
"Why can't you see me during the day?" I asked him, once.
"I first saw you in the bathroom," he said. "I thought I'd fainted. Later I realized I didn't faint; something else happened. Then I started to see you more when I was tired. I don't know why."
"If this is a dream, don't wake me," I said.
He smiled, holding my gaze. "I won't," he said.
My nights were not empty of longing. There were hours when I lay in his bed—when my thread could convince itself to slip under the blanket—and I would watch the shoulders that had wrapped themselves around me. He would whisper, "Stay," and sometimes he meant it like a command, sometimes like a plea.
One evening, he came home with the trace of someone else's laughter on his lips. He had been to a meeting and had run into a woman he described as "neat, a good listener." "My mother will be happy," he said, as if it were a report. The words shook me like a small stone thrown into a hollow pond.
"Did you want to see her again?" I asked.
He paused, fingers playing at the edge of his coffee mug. "I'm trying to live," he said. "I'm trying to be the kind of person my mother wants."
"Do you want any of that to involve me?" I asked, and the question hurt like an exposed nerve.
He reached over and smoothed my hair back with a hand that trembled. "You're here now," he said. "Isn't that what matters?"
Sometimes that felt like everything. Sometimes it felt like the barest surface of a thing that the world would pull apart in the morning.
"How long will I stay?" he asked one night, catching me by surprise. He had sounded like a child trying to understand a complicated math problem.
I slid closer to him. "As long as you like," I answered.
He put his head in his hands. "I can't guarantee anything," he said. "I don't know where I end and the rest begins."
When he left for two weeks on a trip, the apartment felt like a ship without a captain. He tried to arrange for the cat to be looked after. "I don't want to risk bringing you with me," he told me, and the rationality of the sentence cut me like a paper cut—sharp, annoying, small.
"No," I said, but not because I wanted to make a point. I didn't even know what I wanted then except one small selfish wish: to be near him if only a little longer.
The night before he left, he came back late drunk with the smell of wine and an honesty that can only belong to someone who has let their defenses sag. "I saw you tonight," he slurred, and there was a softness there I had not heard.
"You did," I said.
He looked at me like a man looking at an anchor. "I love that you are here," he said, and then his mouth found mine in a motion that was stunned and tender. The kiss was clumsy like two strangers trying to remember the language of comfort. His hand tightened on me like fear and desire braided into one.
"Call me yours if you mean it," he murmured.
"I'm yours," I wanted to say. Instead I asked a smaller thing. "Will you call me when you land?"
"I will," he promised.
Halfway to the airport, the world betrayed me.
There was a headline that refused to make sense: a plane, the number matching his flight, a photo of a departing jet and a timestamp that shrank my heart to the size of an insect. I sat on the couch and watched the news like a hawk watching the sky, waiting for a sign that the world had made a mistake.
I called him again and again. His phone went to voicemail. I paged his email. Nothing. I watched the timeline like a countdown. The minutes were knives.
I remember thinking: what if? what if? what if? Then the "what if" pulled itself into a shape: What if he had gone to a different flight and avoided the storm? What if he was never gone?
I couldn't breathe. Even as a ghost, there is a kind of panic the living cannot imagine. I screamed at the air and the air did nothing but cool my hands.
Then someone touched my shoulder and called my name, and the world folded into a sick, jagged clarity: I woke in a hospital bed, bandaged and stunned, with strangers around me asking if I knew my name.
I had survived a second crash, a small one on my scooter. The accident didn't end me that day. It brought me back.
My first nights after waking were a tangle of truth and parallel dreams.
I walked back into Calder's apartment like someone returning to a house one half-remembered from a favorite book. The cat recognized me and rubbed against my leg with the careless loyalty only animals can show. On the wall, a framed wedding picture looked ordinary and wrong—spade-like smiles carved into faces that had not lived both lives yet.
Calder answered the phone and I heard his voice, and it was a sound that could make a tired city feel safe. "Where have you been?" he asked, and his voice was the simplest, most dangerous thing.
"I thought you were—" I said, and then I saw the tear that hung in the corner of his eye. "Where were you, Calder? For real."
"I had to change flights," he said. "I missed one because of a delay. I don't know how the news reported it. There was a hole for a few hours and then—then they told me the plane had an issue, but I wasn't on it."
"Then why did your flight show up?" I demanded. Confusion left my words rough.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I came back as fast as I could."
I pressed the phone to my chest like it was a hot coal. "I thought you were gone," I said.
"Oh," he said. He laughed then, a single sound like a tear turned sideways. "I came back to you."
The man who stood in front of me now had the shape of the stranger who had shared my apartment, but his face carried new history—an ache filled with memory. He held me with the intensity of someone who had found the only place on earth that felt like home and had been told it might be gone.
There were things to untangle. "Your memory—" I started.
He cut me off, voice careful. "There was a version of me that left," he confessed. "I don't know how the worlds braided. Maybe someone else lived the days where I was gone and kept your things. Maybe there are two of me. What I know is that I came back."
There are moments when the edges of life are very bright: when a person you love breathes your name and it feels like a key that unlocks a whole wing of a house. I held onto him and the apartment and the cat and the small wooden box with the yellow charm, and I promised myself I would not spend another second afraid of the way the world chose to fold.
"Will you stay?" I asked.
He smiled like sunlight catching a glass. "I never left."
I learned later the truth of more complicated things: Calder had kept a journal—small notes and strings of dates—where the days where "I saw her" and "I dreamed of her" were marked in shaky ink. He had told friends that he had been visited by a memory. He had gone through a grief that existed in layers. When the plane news came, he had felt grief and then confusion and then guilt, and he had moved like a man trying to collect scattered coins.
People asked questions. Neighbors whispered. The woman from before—the tidy one—sent him a message asking if they could reschedule. "I don't want to stand in your way," she said. He wrote back, "I don't think I can start anything else right now."
Days passed into something like peace. We fell into rhythms with the intimacy of two people who had been married a hundred lifetimes in a dream. He would buy groceries and talk about work; I would float in the doorway and remind him to drink water. He called me "Jada" when he was sleepy and "Jada" when he was awake, and his voice shaped the syllable into a place.
People in the world assumed our story was simple: a short engagement, a crash, grief, and a tender man who kept someone's things. They didn't know about the nights I used to wear his shirt like a blanket or the mornings I had woken to him humming while chopping an onion.
We didn't have all the answers. We never found out why my life and that other life had spliced like threads. We never discovered whether the man who had seen me first was the "right" one, or whether both versions of Calder—if there were two—were equally true.
"What matters," Calder said one night as he wrapped his arms around me on the sofa and the TV played a stupid cartoon in the background, "is that you're here now and you—are with me. You didn't leave."
"Do you ever think about the other life?" I asked.
He let out a small breath. "Sometimes. But I think the other life has its own story. This one is ours, messy and accidental. We don't have to reclaim every lost thing. We can make new things."
We made small things into treasures: the way he would smooth a stray hair behind my ear, the way he left a mug of coffee by the couch because he knew I'd float past, the way he held the cat between us like a bridge.
There were times when the past part of me tugged like an old net. I dreamed again of a hallway with white walls and a desk where a ring was waiting. But waking up to the weight of his hand and the soft fur of the cat at my feet made it clear: whether my journey had been a dream, a ghost's second life, or the ultimate misplacement of the universe, I had a present that breathed and laughed and could hold me.
"Will you ever forget?" I asked him on a rainy night, listening to the rain make small drumming sounds on the windowpane.
He tucked my chin under his thumb. "Not you," he promised. "Not the way you matter."
His promise was not a vow sealed by a registrar or a stamp, but it was a kind of paper that took ink.
When I think back now, when I reach back to the curving thread of those first days after the accident, I can't separate fear and wonder anymore. I can't say where one ended and the other began. I can only say that at the registry office, the date we had planned to choose was no longer the first promise we made.
We did not have to go to the registry to recognize that something had been given to us. We had each other. A yellow charm sat between our hands like a small sun, and the cat snored in a triangle of light.
"Do you remember the photograph?" Calder asked one afternoon, pulling the graduate photo from the shelf.
"It's my old face," I said. "Young and sure I could step into any plan."
He looked at the smudged corner where a face had once been rubbed out during some careless edit in a past life. "Some things are meant to be found again," he said.
I traced the edge of the yellow talisman with a fingertip that was almost afraid to be real. "Then let's keep finding them," I said.
We did. We kept finding our small, stubborn scraps of joy. We kept making a life in the laundry of ordinary, and at night when the world dimmed, he found me without effort.
"I like your sleep," he said one evening. "You snore in the most adorable way."
"Do I?" I laughed.
He planted a kiss at my temple. "You do," he said. "And you take up all the space like someone who says she belongs."
"Because I do," I answered.
And I did. I belonged to him not because some agreement had signed my name into a ledger but because I had given my moments—the small, sharp pieces of my life—to him, and he did the same in return.
When people asked how we survived that crazy chapter—ghosts and split memories and headlines—they looked for an answer that was maybe less human than the truth. There is no clean explanation.
All I can tell you is this: after the accident, after the blur of one life and the shock of being both present and absent at once, I leaned into a man who had stayed. He took my hand because he wanted to, and he kept it because it made him more himself. I let myself believe in the soft, steady idea that people can keep each other together even after the world does its worst.
Sometimes, late at night, I sit at the window and watch the streetlights blink like a row of small planets. The yellow charm sits on the sill and glows faintly in the lamplight. I press my palm to it and remember the old dream that used to haunt my sleep—the one about a wedding I had not attended and a life I had not yet lived—and I smile.
"Promise me something," he says sometimes, and it used to make me bristle at the cliché. Now I let him ask for small things: to stay a little longer on the sofa, to sleep on the edge of the bed, to watch another stupid movie. He asks and I answer, not because of law or record, not because of time, but because of the heavy, ordinary thing between us.
"Always," I say now, but never in the way that ends a story. I say it in the way that keeps retrieving someone from the places where they nearly disappear.
There is no grand registry seal in the end. There is a photograph returned to its frame, a charm warmed by fingers that remember, and a cat that thinks the world should be devoted to food. There is a man whose life braided with mine in a way that made sense only after we stopped asking for neat answers. There is me, Jada, who learned to keep both past and present in my ribcage like two small birds.
And sometimes, when the lights go down and Calder hums under his breath, I stand in the doorway and whisper the name that used to be mine and the name he made mine, and the house listens.
"You're home," he says, and the word lands like a soft, unbreakable thing.
I am, at last, able to say the same.
The End
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