Hello, Can You Please Stop Haunting Me?

Jeremy watched Eliza’s fingers clasping the handle of her red umbrella. She was in a trance, staring at the same droplet of water on the ground for 5 minutes. The golden sunlight that cracked through gray-ish clouds made everything seemed warm and perfect. It made Eliza seemed perfect, he thought. The shadows fell on her sweet face exquisitely. The shadows of her slightly long eyelashes fell on her cheeks; her blue-with-a-tint-of-green eyes looked glassy. They were sitting in an open area so the light streamed around them – through him – and caused a light halo to form around her hair.

Never had he seen the girl in front of him so vulnerable and broken before.

Her eyes flickered away from the droplet. It stopped raining a couple of minutes ago. The disappointment in Eliza’s eyes was crystal clear. She liked the rain. But even so, she looked at Jeremy and he jumped slightly when she gave a heart-warming smile.

A heart-wrenching smile.

Jeremy had a sudden urge to cry.

“You’re almost transparent today,” she whispered, not wanting to look like a lunatic in the eyes of the public. “I can’t see you much unless I squint.”

“Is that so?” He muttered somewhat absent-mindedly, shoving his hands in his pocket as Eliza nodded softly.

“It’s almost as if you’re slowly fading away from me.”

He looked at Eliza curiously before giving a short laugh. “I thought you disliked my company.”

“I don’t dislike it. I just hate surprises.”

“And what a surprise this is to you, huh?” He said, gesturing to himself. A sheepish smile tugged the corner of his lips and Eliza couldn’t help but to smile back.

“I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to fade.”

Her ears couldn’t believe what she said. Maybe she feared the sight to see him disappear again, even if she didn’t know him much. It was scary. She remembered leaning over the ledge, looking disbelievingly to the figure that was rapidly falling, rapidly becoming just a mere dot before crashing into the angry ocean. If she had been on the bridge a few minutes sooner, what would’ve happen?

If she had known him when he was alive, what would’ve happen then?

“Don’t worry,” he said, swooping down and sitting next to her. Those warm eyes gazed back into hers. “I won’t leave. For now.”

Right, Eliza thought. He was just a ghost. A broken soul.

She struggled with herself before parting her lips again to ask him, “Jeremy, why did you do it?”

Those warm eyes turned dark.

“I’m not proud of it,” he murmured, rubbing his nose. “I just wanted to escape.”

“From what?”

“The voices in my head,” Jeremy replied curtly, implying that he didn’t want to talk about it much and that the conversation was over. He looked at the clouds bitterly. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Eliza how what he did was pointless. That the voices in his head was still there, lingering in his mind, polluting his thoughts with the most suffocating sentence ever.

“I hate myself.”