Anthelion

"What are you?" she asked a long while later. I knew a lot of time had passed because there wasn't anymore light to illuminate her slight frame or to shine her wheat-colored hair.

What am I? I don't know. I'm supposed to be something?

She smiled and shifted her position in a way that caused the robe to somewhat slide from her right shoulder, revealing more of her chest.

"Well, yeah. You can't just be nothing. Like, I'm a person, a girl, and that is a lamp." She pointed a long finger to her bedside table lamp.

I don't understand.

"Are you a ghost?"

What is a ghost?

Her eyebrows knitted together and the corners of her mouth turned downward creating an expression that I didn't know could be hers. Then, she sighed and said, "A ghost is the spirit of a person who was once alive and had a body that could touch things and other people. When the person becomes a ghost, they don't have a body and they can't touch anything or feel anything, except sadness, I suppose. And they are usually cold, because dead things are cold, and usually not everyone can see or hear them."

I pondered that for a moment, but there was no possible way that I could be a ghost. I wasn't even aware that I was anything until she asked me. A "ghost" seemed miserable, and I was not miserable by any means.

I can't be a ghost.

Her face took on that foreign expression again, the one that made me lurch inside.

There was nothing before you. I wasn't alive, I wasn't anything.

She raised her eyebrows and asked me if I knew her name.

Name?

She rolled her eyes, "Oh, come on. You don't even know what a name is?"

I just stared into her eyes and she stared back, searching. Her mouth parted slightly and I could feel her soft, warm breath hitting me with the force of hurricane winds. She saw into me and I saw into her as if we'd always been connected.

She whispered, "I see so much of myself in you."

Claire.