Author's Note: Slight spoilers for Ghost; the end is sort of where that episode begins. And of course, I don't own them. Just borrowing.
Breathe
These days, she sometimes has to remind herself to breathe. To pull air into her lungs and push it out again. It's just another one of those things that she does because she's supposed to. The blinding freshness doesn't surprise her anymore; she's given up being surprised. She tries to give up remembering as well, but finds that she can't.
She isn't used to failing.
It's a nice enough town, she supposes. Clean. A bit sterile, but she might be all right with it if she'd allow herself to be. But it's not the city; nothing's the city, and nothing's the same.
When she was younger, she always loved reading spy novels. To put on sunglasses and blend into a crowd, slip on a wig and become someone new. There was a certain kind of devious magic in disappearing so completely, and so she'd always supposed that those sorts of people must lead terribly exciting lives. But lately she's been finding that she's been wrong about almost everything.
It's so much like dying that sometimes she wonders if she's been wrong about that too. That maybe she really is dead, and nobody will tell her. She's drowning and she's drowning and she can't break the surface.
At first she was nearly housebound. Around every corner the echoes of her past darted into shadows. She was instructed to join this new world that she never wanted in the first place, but the idea terrified her. Every man a murderer. The introductions were almost worse – I'm Emily, she'd tell people, the syllables sounding harsh and foreign in her mouth. She fears now that one day she'll lose all control, that she'll stand in the middle of the quiet suburban grocery store and scream her name until her voice is raw. I'm not Emily, I'm not Emily, you can't make me be her. But she always blinks away the tears, swallows the yells begging to come out.
They notified her when her mother died. Told her they were sorry, but there was no way she could go to the funeral. They said they didn't want two. They don't understand that she's already dead, and she feels like laughing at their concern, but can't quite summon the energy. It really doesn't matter to her anymore.
She wonders every day what the real world is like. She lives in an isolated cocoon, so much so that she's begun to think that the clouds aren't really clouds at all but cotton to keep her from hurting herself if she falls into the sky. It seems likely, some days; she doesn't really notice the dirt that she walks on. She's taken to walking around in a sort of trance, smile neatly fastened on and steps even, but she isn't really there. She's still walking the streets of New York, heels clicking on the sidewalks and being dwarfed by the buildings of glass and steel stretching so high that she could never quite see the tops of them. It was the only time she was happy to feel small.
The air here is so different. She notices it mostly in the mornings, before most of her neighborhood wakes up. She's used to rising early; she's finding that most habits don't leave you so easily. She looks out of her window and expects to see traffic creeping around a corner far below her, cabs bunched by the doors of apartment buildings, waiting. But now she's the one waiting, and she isn't sure she knows how. On the good days she eats her breakfast on her back porch, and she has to admit that the air is better here. New York sent smog curling into the air; here she's beginning to realize that there are farms on the periphery of her shrinking universe, farms and mud and green. So much green could blind a person. Kind of like looking into the sun.
Nights are the worst, she's decided. She's found it difficult to sleep – they warned her this would happen – and some evenings she doesn't even bother to go to bed at all. She gets a mug of tea, wraps her hand around it, and stares out the window into so much nothing. She hums, plays the radio quietly, anything to stop the silence of Wisconsin from screaming in her ears.
It's only early afternoon, but she's tired. She comes home from work and goes upstairs to change – a new life, but she still has to wear pantyhose, and thinks this is patently unfair. A car pulls into her driveway – an unfamiliar sound, and she feels the panic rising. She tries to remember to breathe and pulls back the filmy curtains hanging at her window. Light floods the room; burns her eyes.
The End