I found your body in my bed again. You were tucked in like a child, the sheets bunched up around your sides, your arms straight down like you were standing at attention. Or rather lying down. At attention still. Your eyes were closed and your head laid perfectly in the middle of the pillow in the middle of the bed in the middle of the room. You made the bed look like a coffin. I could have folded the sides over and buried you. Not that it mattered right now. 

I couldn’t tell if you were breathing, but I was almost sure you were. Your lips were parted slightly, cracked. I didn’t want to put my hand up to your face to check. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe I was scared. You looked like you did after you would cry to me about nothing, tell me it was nothing, and then sleep like you believed yourself.  Maybe that’s what scared me. Maybe scared isn’t the right word. You looked like you did before, but I was seeing you outside of myself, ourself, finally. I saw your lips, cracked. I tried to see the air slipping between them, chapping them slightly after hours of this work, but I couldn’t then. I think I could now if I tried hard enough. But, if I had really tried hard enough, I could have reached out and felt for your breath with my hand. 

I could see the outline of your hands, hands that were always digging for treasure, hands always ready to catch a meteor, hands I knew quite well. I forgot the details of them then, though. The shape of them was familiar, but without the flesh I was lost. I remember hoping they still looked the same. Schrodinger’s hands. 

The only way to exorcise a ghost is to forget it.