Segment 1

         I walked in on your death, and it made me a ghost.
         I only caught a glimpse, I swear. That’s all it took. I don’t know how it happened, I used to know better. I didn’t mean to, but time’s made me careless and I wasn’t paying attention. Stupid, I know. You would have yelled at me for it, had you known. Beginner’s stuff, always know your setting, no matter how comfortable it feels. Because you never know. Dammit.
         I want to think it was chance. It had to be. There was no other way it could have come down. That’s what I tell myself. I made myself vulnerable, the shifts always do that to me. I don’t even remember why I was there, in the first place. Grand danger, maybe. Do you even care? Would you even be able to hear about my life, if I was able to condense. It’s not important.
         This is how it happened. I don’t know how it happened.
         It was too soon for a jump, or I would have done so, and been gone. But everything has to settle first. That was my mistake. I didn’t know I was in the hospital. I was walking out and I had no idea where the hell I was. Funny, right? Always know where you are, it’s the only thing that roots you. I know where you are now. No, I don’t. I don’t know anything. I didn’t know where I was and nothing reminded me, not the white coats or the hurried walking or the beepings or air plastered with words that don’t seem to have any place in this language or the great constant sighing about the place, a single body exhaling in relief, grateful to finally let go. It should have come to me. Through sterile halls and busy interiors, I didn’t realize. I thought I was somewhere else, in another place, at another point, in a place that the exact opposite of what it actually was. I can still taste the fluorescent lighting, the way it makes your skin tingle when you’re not used to it.
         I’m rambling. I know. I’m trying to explain. I’m sorry. There’s no need to. I know I know I know.
         I meant to keep walking. But I keep telling you, I didn’t know where I was. I wanted to see a smile on a face I knew, not wrapped in paradox. You don’t understand, how lonely it gets when you’re out of step with everything. It was the voices that drew me in, finally, the mingling of familiar tones, softened by a hammer I didn’t recognize. It made me stop and I saw the shapes wrapped in comforting angles. That must be why. It had to be. Or my damn curiosity, because I don’t when I’ve seen too much. I don’t know, I told you, I can’t explain. You’re not listening. But you can’t listen, when you’re not here.
         I don’t remember making the decision to walk in. It wasn’t conscious. It couldn’t have been. I wouldn’t have done it, had I been thinking. There was a trembling bend to their bodies that I recognized, that I’d seen before, in another time, with my own eyes. That had to be it. The hook. Under the skin, piercing without bleeding, tugging at me. I could have resisted. I’d walked away before, under greater temptation. But I didn’t. Dammit. I could see them from the hallway and I had to know what was happening. But I didn’t think, because I walked in.
         I have a rule, you see. I never told anyone this because it sounds morbid maybe but it’s the way I do things. It’s always worked. I don’t hang around in familiar zones, in a certain span of years. Because of what I might see. It’s rare but even the possibility, I don’t even want to accept. So I stray, I stay away.
         And I didn’t. And this is why. Because I saw you.
         I only got as far as the doorway, I’m fairly sure. Nobody saw me. Perhaps I was already disintegrating then, light reaching me before the rest of it did. Before all sensation struck. I’m trained to take it all in, and I did. The room, lit so sparsely, the shades already drawn, as if trying to keep something out. Your family, huddled by you, swollen eyes staring at you, giving up without losing hope. Your mother was touching you, just two fingers on the edge of your skin, on your arm, as if expecting you to vaporize any second and wanting to catch whatever small bit of moisture might seep into her flesh, a softness she could smell and perhaps remind herself of you when the day ended, to prove that you weren’t gone. Beyond them, behind them, contrasting with the greyness of the room were bright cards and ballons, flowers with cards from people I couldn’t see. Maybe one was from me. I can’t know. I’ll never know. It was all coming to me in a glistening strobe rain, light falling away from me as I strove to catch up to it. I heard the sighing wheeze of your breathing and it was too artificial, too mechanical. And I knew something was wrong.
         You were too small. You were always that way but this wasn’t right. The sheets were covering you too firmly, a cloth coffin, and the outline of your body revealed by the covering was all wrong, an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I was already reeling away, even without moving. The bags of liquid hanging around you, leading to the needle in your arm. Your eyes were closed and it was the taut relaxation of finality. There was a tube going down your throat, an obscene monstrosity, a segmented worm drawing all the life out of you, and I heard the cold sighing pumping and I knew. And I knew and I knew, triggering landmines in the brain. My mother. It’s not important. I tell myself I didn’t look away. I didn’t know even then what was going on. I thought it was just routine, at first. A part of you I knew already. But then your father touched your hair, just brushed against with faint loss and it drew me to your face, the skin too slack, the color just a shade off, sliding into the wrong spectrum.
         Your body jerked then, just a little bit, maybe fighting against the chains trying to make a prisoner out of you and it meant nothing and it meant everything and I couldn’t help but love you a little for that, for making that one gesture in the emptiness. Someone caressed your forehead, as if trying to calm you, to let you go too gently. But no. I was grabbing the doorframe and the whole temperature of the day was wrong, settled into stratifications that were tearing me apart. All the seconds jumbling together. The great wheezing, slowing down finally, the long struggle giving ground. A set of eyes looking away. I don’t know why. It wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been, I owed you that much. A bit of bravery, given all this. A lady shushed you, even though you didn’t say anything. Sh. It was all compressing around me, centering on my chest, running around my head like a clay mold, constricting and I staggered and nobody could see. Not a single head turned. Not a single eye sought. The realization was taking me apart. The room was saturated with loss and I couldn’t handle it. Your chest rising just a little less with each second. The grinding becoming more strained, not a sense of effort in your face, already resolved to see how it would end, letting it all play out as it had to go. You faced it better than any of us, in the end. I might have bit through my lip. I don’t remember. The flowerburst of pain meant nothing. Everything was you. All of it. I didn’t mean to see it, I told you.
         So caught up, I hardly noticed when the room went totally silent, all my hearing removed, all my cells quivering, striving to get away. Because I told you. I did. I wasn’t stable. I saw it before I was settled. And I was slipping through, right into the cracks. My vision blurred and I could see your mother bent over, nestling in grief already, her hands plaintively clutching your limp arm, frantically grabbing for some bit of life, trying to find it before it went completely. But it was gone. I know too much. I forget too little. Your father, staring at you with numbed disbelief, his face drawn into a mask, watching with the intensity of someone who might reverse time itself with force of will just to see you breathe one last time and take that second and repeat it over and over and somehow make a whole new life from it. But it was too late. What we have we have all too briefly.
         I think I saw all of that, in the midst of your death.
         But I can’t be sure because seized by an angular panic, I turned away from the scene just as a cold wind took me and I dissolved like colored dust, carried away by the breeze until I blended with the fabric itself.