The Illusion of Separation

"I can't believe we're here."

Carter shrugged. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I know you don't have any better ones, Miz Hannah Foster." The way he said my name made me sound twenty years older than I was. I already felt twenty years older than I was, so I ended up feeling about fifty. Distantly I wondered why I continued to hang out with these people when it was obviously so detrimental to my mental health. Oh, that's right. Because I was Hannah Foster and I couldn't have normal friends; I had to have one friend that was way too mature for his years and simultaneously a three-year-old in mental years, and one friend that had just died and was partying it up in the afterlife while deciding he should stick around and torment me.

Remind me to get new friends.

I'm kidding, though. I wouldn't want anyone besides Carter and Chris. They knew me like no one else knew me, as overused as that expression is. They had spent the years getting to know me, all my faults and weaknesses, as well as my strengths and dreams and goals. They knew that when I grew up I wanted to go into social work because I loved kids. They knew that the reason I loved kids was because I didn't have any siblings of my own and having kids around that were close to me felt like I had a million siblings all at the same time. They knew that the deciding factor of me going into social work was because of my mom and me feeling like she was never there for me, like she didn't care enough about me to stay. They knew that that killed me inside and that I didn't want anyone else to feel like that.

There were also things that only one or the other knew. Carter knew that I loved the way it felt when he cuddled up with me on the couch. He knew I wanted a big brother more than almost anything in the world and he knew that I could recite the musical Wicked word-for-word because I used to listen to the CD adaption when I was a kid and my dad didn't want me bothering him and my mom. (Chris would never stop laughing if he knew.) Carter knew that I used to play the piano until I decided there was no reason to anymore and that that was part of what contributed to the eternal pessimism that seemed to follow right behind my fake optimism. He knew that I tried to learn ukulele after Chris told me one night that it would make me so much more attractive to him. Both of us knew he was kidding, but my can't-let-it-go attitude took over and I "played" until my fingers bled and never got any better. That was a night Carter slept over because he was worried about me. He knew that once I was in that mood, not much could stop me. He hid under the covers next to me and I fell asleep in his arms, and he snuck out the back door at six the next morning, leaving me to wake up to a Waffle House breakfast burrito because he knew those were my favorite.

There were things that Christofer knew that Carter didn't, though, too. Christofer knew exactly where to touch to make me laugh and he knew where to touch to turn me on. He knew what I looked like at midnight with the water in my hair and the moon reflecting off of it. He knew what I looked like in the shower, naked and vulnerable. He knew what it felt like to hug me from behind when that happened, and he knew all my favorite places to touch him as well as all my favorite places for him to touch me. He knew that my favorite song was "Clocks" by Coldplay because that used to be my mom's favorite song before she started getting into really weird indie music, and not Christofer's kind of indie, either. It was the weird shit that no one really liked, and they liked to pass themselves off as indie as a way to disguise the fact that they really didn't have any fans because their music sucked, and they weren't indie at all, just a suckish band with twenty fans who only listened because they thought they could bang the band members.

And Christofer knew what it felt like to be inside me.

All things aside, that's a pretty cheesy statement to make, but it's true. I wasn't ashamed to know that he was the only one I had ever had sex with. I wasn't a super-religious no-sex-until-marriage kind of girl, but I wasn't one that liked to sleep around, either. I didn't really care if someone was that kind of person. To each his own. But I wasn't, and so Christofer had gotten something from me that was difficult to get.

Anyway, we were sitting in the office of an alleged psychic who could apparently speak with the dead. After exhausting every mental possibility we could come up with, we decided it was best to try and speak with someone who knew something about...well, the dead. Whether she really did know something or not was yet to be determined. If she was a fluke, we'd know it, considering Christofer was right there with us and she should be able to see him or hear him or something. Then again, Carter and I could see him and we had no idea why. Yeah, we were close to him, but his own family couldn't see him and I know for a fact he loves his family more than he could ever love me. It's not a sad truth. It's a happy truth. I'd be worried if he loved a girlfriend more than his own flesh and blood.

"This is never going to work," I said, always the eternal optimist.

"Sure it will. She'll be able to see Chris, and we'll figure out some way to either bring him back or help him move on, and everything will be just fine." Carter leaned back in his chair with a smile on his face like everything was going to be peachy, which we all knew it wasn't. We probably wouldn't be able to bring Christofer back, at least not in his own body, and if he moved on then we'd have to go through the grief of him dying all over again and knowing that he wouldn't come back this time.

Christofer was scared, too. You could tell from the harmonica. He was playing all these minor chords which freaked the hell out of me. They floated around the empty room and made me feel like something was going to jump out of the dark doorway across from us at me. I always get that way at songs full of minor chords. I couldn't sleep for four days once because I heard "Hurt" by Christina Aguilera on the radio and it kept playing in my head over and over. Weird, because now I love the song.

"Would you shut up?" I asked him.

He grinned and kept playing. I wasn't mad. He was Chris and you just had to expect that kind of behavior from him. You couldn't separate him from his music. It was what he was feeling, except he didn't know how to express it so the only thing he could do was to put it into notes and chords. Otherwise he'd, I don't know, start writing depressing poetry or something.

About four minutes later, an older woman, probably in her forties, appeared at the doorway, dressed in that exotic clothing you usually see on psychics. She was either Native American or Meditarranean -- I couldn't tell under the makeup and clothing. She scanned the room and said with a smile, "So three of you, then?"

Carter and I looked at each other, beaming.