My dear,
When I die, I want to come back and haunt you for the days, weeks, months, even years that should have been ours.

Maybe you’ll be really old by then, your skin hanging in life-stained, elephant folds. I hope so. I hope you will have lived a good, long life. I’ll remember you as you were, with all your hair and dark fur on your body; you were solid in flesh and in values. But I will still love you denuded of hair and body fur, less tethered to flesh and values, closer perhaps to what I am. I’ll perch on your lap with my arms around your neck and lean in close to kiss you. Will you remember then? You may have to feel your way back to the memory past my icy cold lips, past whatever mangling may have occurred on the way to my ghostly state. I’ll slide a cold hand under your shirt and lay my head on your shoulder and remind you.

We’ll hang a white sheet over the wall in your bedroom, the one that faces your marital bed, with the photo of your wedding, and your son’s birth, his wedding, the births of your grandchildren. We’ll set up the old-school projector to whir and clank and rattle some more of your memories loose. We’ll watch ‘Ghost’ and ‘Ghostbusters’, and ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. After, I’ll wear a bowler hat and dance for you.

If your wife comes in, I’ll drape the sheet around myself and make woo-woo noises to scare her off.

Are you glad you chose her over me? Were you happy together?

I may have made you happy too.

I’ll lure you out after dark when the family is sleeping. We’ll find a bar that plays the hits of the British New Wave and serves cheap vodka, the kind that burns like the devil’s own nectar going down and coming back up. At three am we’ll stumble out, sweating and laughing and find a tattoo parlor where we’ll split the line “love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. In the morning, the family will quiz you about what half of yourself you have lost but you’ll just shake your head and wink at the empty space they see where you see me.

Let me haunt you and I will be your love. I will come to you in quiet moments. We will be gentle together this time, I promise. I will kiss you and whisper in your ear and you will tell me all the silly things you feel and think that haunt you now because they held you back from loving me all those years ago.

With my love, for *eternity.

*or perhaps a trial period to start

Kerry Anderson is a writer living and working in South Africa and Singapore. She is usually unsettled and often confused which she treats with (videos of) elephants, cats, and Yazoo. She has had her work published in The Masters Review, Surely Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Writers.com, among others. Find more on her website.