Ghost

You close your eyes and sink into coziness. At first, you imagine something narrow between your fingers, a pencil, perhaps. Soon it loses its hardness. Your arms fold around something soft upon your chest, and as you draw the blanket closer, arranging it tenderly against yourself, you are holding a form. Sleep has not yet taken you. It lingers nearby, waiting softly.

When you become very tired, voices sprout from inside the silence. Mother is speaking somewhere beyond comprehension, her words gone but their maternal rhythm remaining. Sister keeps saying, “Sí. Sí.”

You remember her as a baby and how you taught her that word, watching her struggle until the sound finally emerged and became her own. The blanket shifts within your arms. It has become a baby. A small and helpless life, curled into a warm ball above your chest. You hold it protectively, cocooned between your body and the blanket, certain that no harm can reach it while you remain awake.

Behind your eyelids, the sepia noise of the closed-eye universe begins to fluctuate. It is that familiar limbo, neither darkness nor light, but a restless field of brown and golden particles flowing like dust through ancient water. Forms gather, spiral, dissolve and gather again.

Something is assembling itself in the darkness. You sense its movement before you see it. You open your eyes. Sister is sitting beside you in a purple sweater. She looks at you with a quiet tenderness, as though she has been watching over you for some time. For a moment, her presence seems perfectly natural. Then you remember the impossibility of her being there. You look at her in surprise, maybe you have now gone completely mad.
The instant she realizes that you can see her, the gentleness turns to astonishment, as though she, too, had not expected to become visible. Then she fades, slowly enough for you to witness her departure from the room.

As the figure vanishes, or perhaps in the very same moment, one apparition giving way to another—you see a man whose face resembles the image of Christ repeated throughout the history of art. He appears to be about thirty-five, with long hair, a beard, olive-brown eyes and a strongly arched nose. His face belongs to no living person you know, yet it is immediately familiar. Of all the images you have seen, he most resembles the Christ of Albrecht Dürer.

He sees you, and you see him, and within his gaze you understand that he has come neither to accuse nor command you, but to watch over you. Then he begins to ascend towards the ceiling. As he passes beyond your sight, he leaves behind a faint smudge of essence. The stroke trails downwards as he rises, as though his departure has divided the directions of the world.

It resembles the soul you once saw in a dream, the same kindness, the same quiet smile, the same eyes like flakes of starlight. The darkness and sepia noise shape themselves into your reflection, though it is not the face you know from mirrors. It is a gentler self, perhaps the part of you that survives the flesh, or perhaps only the self you hope exists beyond it.

And you lie between sleep and waking, unable to tell which world has entered the other.