"Ghost" (Patreon)

The third in a series of short works I wrote 1-2 years ago for the Destiny franchise. You don't need to be familiar with the games to enjoy. The only context needed is that Guardians are immortal warriors who can die and be resurrected by their Ghost companions ad infinitum. I hope you like ❤️

I don’t remember you, but I know your face.

It’s an image emblazoned in the blackness of my eyelids. A portrait etched in the lines on my palms. A memory both stained and smeared across the fabric of my flesh, a vile wound that cannot heal.

I don’t know who you are, but I remember how it ached to know you.

A bittersweet warp and weft of warmth and wither. Love laced with venom, slowly poisoning who I was with each attempt to stave that gnawing hunger of loneliness, acceptance, belonging. Foolishly trying to sate the body only to chip away at it bit by bit. The architect of her own unmaking. The host watching her guests rip her home apart without a word of protest. Surely it was done without malice, after all, right? You didn’t mean to hurt her. I hope.

I don’t know your name, but I remember how the word tasted on my tongue.

A title given but never earned. Sour on the lips, dry in the throat. It once meant something to me, or at least, the me that once occupied these bones. Is that a different me? Or are we one and the same?

Perhaps she had a name not unlike mine. After all, our flesh adorns the same foundation. Her eyes that once beheld lifetimes I’ll never know now show me the wilderness at my feet, the gun in my hands. Her mind that once contained countless memories in images of vibrant colors now flickers black and white ambiguity in the settled dust left behind. Her heart that once beat for every love she ever knew now keeps me alive, long after I should be.

I wish I could ask her whose face I see in my dreams. Why it haunts her, yet she goes toward it every night. I wish I could tell her to stop clinging to that barbed wire. ‘Silly girl, it will never let you cross without pricking you.’

I don’t remember you, because I don’t remember me.

The Ghosts are just as clueless. Starling offers no help. How could she? I was nothing more than ash from a spilt kiln when I woke, a puddle of once-humanity turned to dust, fragments of me forever scattered to the wind.

How did you die, I wonder? How did she—I—die?

When my final death greets me like a long-lost lover, will the girl I was and the girl I am meet eternity together? I hope I’ll get the chance to ask her about you first. If only to lay your memory to rest, to let her be at peace.

To give me peace.