As I stared at Greg, I knew that if I opened my mouth to speak, it would come as a blubbery garble of words. Instead, I walked silently to Greg to rest my head on his chest.
I passed right through him.
A shrill shriek pierced my ears and it took me a moment to realize that the sound was coming out of my own mouth. Even then I didn’t stop. I screamed until my throat was raw and it felt like my soul was disintegrating from the inside out. I hoped it was.
“Well, what does she want to say?” Greg asked. He spoke over my scream. He couldn’t hear me. He couldn’t feel me. I had thought I could come back to him, to stay with him, be his shadow. But he didn’t even know I was here. I wasn’t real to him.
“She’s…at a loss for words right now,” Paul Michael said. He watched me closely, looking at me instead of Greg. I fell silent, listening to Paul Michael speak. “She’s really overwhelmed by seeing you again. It’s very different from what she was expecting.”
“Yeah, this wasn’t how I was expecting my night to go either,” Greg said with a nervous laugh. His laugh was so familiar that I wanted to wrap myself in it to see if it would take me back to a time when I could be seen and heard and felt.
Now, I was nothing. I was a figment of my brother’s imagination, for all Greg knew.
I wanted to shout, “I’m here. I’m right here!” but I knew that when he didn’t hear me, I would start to cry.
Instead, I stiffened my shoulders. I stood in the exact same spot as Greg in my attempt to make contact with him. I briefly wondered how this looked to Paul Michael as I occupied the same space as Greg. Even with Greg all around me, I couldn’t feel him and he made no signs that he could feel me. The boy I had loved so desperately when I was alive couldn’t reach me once I was dead. I did not exist.