Ghost's Cake

[Eternity Falling]

I suppose birthday cake isn’t fitting.

But there, on a china platter beside the headstone is a birthday cake, frosted blue with seventeen candles. The steady drizzle has extinguished the fire on all but one, which soon sputters and hisses under the weight of a cool rain drop. The color of the cake is bright, stark, against the wet granite of the headstone, out of place. Something happy in a sea of sad.

The world is grey. A thick cloud of fog has settled over the cemetary and the rain glows about the lonely headstones, dying flowers, shivering bows. I cannot feel the rain. But I can feel the cold. It is always cold.

Everything is muffled, his receding footsteps rumble as if from a tunnel, and the sobs that tore fom his throat no more than a strangled cry that I could barely hear. I ached to reach out and touch his shoulder, just once, to let him know everything was alright. I ached to touch anything, but ghost fingers pass right through material objects like nothing more than air.

I had never imagined that I wouldn’t turn seventeen. I had never imagined that I would die. Death had always been an enigma, something distorted by myth and legend, hope, faith, sadness before I had experienced it. None of the stories are true. Humans have the need to gloss everything over, make it something beautiful in order to continue living in happiness. Death is being stuck. In limbo between life and nonexistence. The grey in the middle of black and white. Being on the outside and peeking in through a window, and itching to break the window and burst back into life, in a real body, to cherish warmth and contact, breath, the beat of a heart. I wish I could remember the caress of his lips over mine, the taste of strawberries in summer heat, the feel of snow crunching underfoot. Being a ghost is floating. Flitting from here to there, wandering aimlessly. Lost and forgotten for eternity.

I have been forgotten by everyone but him. I wish I could remember his name; I know he was special to me, that I was in love with him. But I don’t know who he is. But he comes everyday and talks to this stone, leaves little gifts. Trinkets that the cemetary caretakers remove from the grave and throw away. And this day, he left a birthday cake. It is my birthday, that much I know. How long has it been? A whole year. I think I died on my birthday. All I remember is pain. Seeking relief from pain, toward nothingness, where echoes resound noiselessy, where touch is left behind, that void. I wanted this void. And this is all my fault.

I kneel. If only, just once, I could grasp....anything. Fingers outstretched, wanting just a lick of that blue frosting. But, as always, my fingers flow right through. Too bad no one has ever invented ghost cake.

I rise and turn toward an intimidating scorched cloud. And float away. I wanted an end. All I got was an endless beginning.