Page 42 of Earthly Ties

“I am sitting on the bed, but I can be next to the table instead. Just don’t walk into me without a little warning, please.” I pull myself over to the table, and ground myself. Feet resting flat on the floor, I add, “Now take your pants off. Please. The seams are irritating you.” With that, I smack the feather as hard as I can.

It floats to the floor on the first try.

“That was much faster than ten seconds.” Esther stops the recording and hits the replay, bending over to pick up the feather. Her head and arms pass through my legs before I can move away.

I curse under my breath, jumping back toward the bed.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! I just went through you, didn’t it? I’ll give you more time next time.” Esther covers her face as she listens to my message. “This is going to sound so silly, but if I take my pants off, if I keep acting like you’re not here even though I know you are, can you…” Her sigh comes out more like a hiss. “Can you not judge me too much? I’ve gotten so strange since moving here, because there’s no one to tease me for acting like a gremlin, and with everything shut down, I’ve kind of…stopped caring. Since there was no one to see me, to care if I was too weird. But now I know you’re here, so there is, and I don’t want you to think less of me.”

She sets the feather on the table, and hits record.

“Um, you have a very cute apartment,” I say, wondering where I’m going with this. But there’s no time limit, so I can figure it out as I go. “You decorated, you’ve made it yours, this is your home. In my apartment, I was living out of boxes and the only decoration was the red wine stain on the carpet by the couch. You call yourself strange, and yeah, you might be, but I was strange too. For all I know, everyone is strange. Your weird habits are charming, instead of sad or pathetic like mine were.”

I pause, trying to find the line of encouraging her to trust me, without making it seem like I’m hitting on her again. “Even after haunting you for months, I hold you in nothing but the highest regard, respect, and admiration. I’m sorry—” My voice catches in my throat. “I’m sorry that I’ve put you in this position, and the last thing I want is to burden you or make you uncomfortable. And right now, those damn pants are making you uncomfortable, so won’t you please, take them off. For my sake, if not your own.”

Grounding myself, I swat at the feather. This time, it takes a couple tries before it falls.

Esther listens to the playback, giving me a minute to back away, before she picks up the feather. “Fine.” She stands up to kick off her pants, chucking them across the room toward the closet. “But for the record, I’m doing this because you asked.” She sits back down in her chair, arms crossed. The seams of her pants have left red welts in the soft skin of her thighs.

I’m half-tempted to run my hands along them; what would burn me would soothe her skin. But Esther could grab a cool cloth or lotion if she needed. I’m already pushing her out of her comfort zone; she doesn’t need me asking for consent to touch her, too.

“Lucy, are you comfortable?” Esther asks, setting the feather on the table before she hits record. “Anything I can do to improve this experience for you?”

I gape at her. How do I answer that? “I’m…I’m fine,” I finally murmur. I stand there for a few moments, reeling. Has anyone ever asked me that? “I don’t really…feel things?” I offer, trying to fill the silence that will feel awkward as soon as Esther listens back to this. “I can see, I can hear. The only sense of feeling I have is a mild ache when I reach the end of our Tie, and the burn when I pass through you. So, yeah, I guess I’m as comfortable as I can be, just as long as I don’t get too far away from you, or get too close to you. Are you comfortable? Or okay? Anything I can do, besides move on and leave you alone?”

With a bitter scoff, I hit the feather. Better to stop talking now.

Esther listens back, frowning a little when she hears about the temporary pain I occasionally experience, then harder when I talk about moving on. “No, I am…well, happy, I guess? Relieved could be the right word?”

She sets the feather back down and hits record.

“Why, because your pants are off?” I tease, hitting the feather before she has a chance to pull her hand away. It rustles in her fingers.

Esther smiles when she listens. “No! I mean, yeah, but no. Now that I can hear your voice. You feel more relaxed now than you usually do.” She touches her chest again, where she’d felt me laughing earlier. “So is there anything I can do to make your life—sorry, poor choice of words. Uh, day better?” She hits record.

“You didn’t say good morning this morning,” I murmur, feeling like a little kid again, asking for a hug that Mom never gave me. “You say good morning every morning, and you didn’t say it. And well, nights are really um…long? They can be taxing on my mental health. And you always say good morning and talk to yourself and do a singalong in the shower, but you didn’t today. So um, don’t stop doing that please, because it helps. Like, I remember who I am, where I am, easier when you talk to yourself.” I tell myself to stop talking, to hit the feather, because I’m already oversharing all the vulnerable parts of me.

And yet, I can’t seem to stop.

“Hearing your voice helps me start my day better, like seeing a sunrise. That’s why I call you East, like from Romeo and Juliet. It’s actually my least favorite Shakespearean work, but by the time your alarm goes off, I am so lost in my own existential crises that I have a newfound appreciation for a story where they yearn so hard that they actually believe they might end up together, even though we all know the story will end in tragedy.” I huff, annoyed at myself beyond belief. “Sorry, I’m lecturing on a tangent now about teenage hormones leading to a double-suicide. Please ignore all of this, and just…please keep saying good morning to yourself, because I really enjoy it.” I smack the feather hard enough that I accidentally graze Esther’s fingers. The burn is tempting to just stick my whole self through her in hopes of lighting my soul on fire, so I don’t have to listen to this message when she plays it back.

Esther smiles as she listens, pressing her hand to her mouth as she murmurs, “So that’s where East came from.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t say it this morning because I didn’t want you to think I was a weirdo who says good morning when no one is here. But you are here, and you’ve been here so you already know that. I will absolutely say good morning to you from now on.” She readies the recording again, thankfully not dissecting all the vulnerability I just verbally spewed at her. “So, Dr. Monae, if I can ask: now that you’re dead and a ghost, do you have all the answers about life and death?” Esther holds up the feather again and hits record.

A laugh escapes me, relieved to change the subject to something more…detached. “God, no! All I have are more questions. I’ve been trying to remember some of them, but it’s hard without a journal to document everything in. My current hypothesis is that my short-term memory is shit because my memories aren’t being processed in your sleep cycle. Can I prove that? No. I can’t prove anything. I don’t know why I’m here, or if there is any greater meaning to all of this. As far as I know there’s no Divine Principle or Atlanteans. Blavatsky had it all wrong. Well, mostly wrong, because she contradicted herself a lot. She was right in the way that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But I am getting way off topic. The only thing I’ve proven is that the early theosophists were full of shit.” I smack the feather in her fingers, hoping that gets a laugh out of her. Professional banter, not flirting.

To my delight, Esther does laugh. I smile at the peal of her voice.

“Dr. Monae! You mean the content of your course—the course I am teaching for you, I might add—is presenting inaccurate information?” Esther presses a hand to her chest. “Shocked, I say, I am simply shocked! I completely changed my conception of the afterlife to the Neoplatonist belief in the return to the One, and now you tell me it’s not real?”

As soon as her finger clicks record, I tease, “Don’t you have some grading to do, Dr. Voigt?” and swipe the feather.

Esther’s smile dims a little, and she nods. “Unfortunately. No rest for the people pleasers.” She sticks the feather into the hinge of her laptop. “I should probably get on that, but if you have something to say, make the feather move, and I’ll bring the meeting invite back up so we can talk. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, that’s okay.” I’m sure she can feel my disappointment, but I push reassurance in her direction as much as I can. Our conversation was at times awkward and stilted, but my relief of finally being heard, of having a real conversation with her, is endless. I don’t know if she can feel it, but Esther nods anyway, and pulls up the many essays awaiting grading.

Bargaining

“You know the thing I hate most about intro classes?” Esther keeps her voice low, hunched over her grading pile so her colleagues don’t hear her talking in her office. “Gotta be the students who consider intro classes to be below them.”