prologue
It’s a fuzzy memory, or maybe foggy is the word; it resembles the atmosphere most, so it makes sense she’d gravitate towards the latter more. Regardless of what word looks right, both feel entirely different. Fuzzy is like the blanket that encompasses around her when her when that older woman, the one who must’ve looked so much like what she herself would’ve in her fifties, fuzzy is warm and akin to a child’s lips as they mush words around to sound as old as the people around them. She’s using fuzzy, but foggy is cold and distant- a juxtaposition to warm and fuzzy weather, the feelings that should stay and not taint from the outdoor haze. Still, she’s tainted by it because she’s looking at it, staring through the glass of water she -or someone else, she can’t remember- ordered that sits in front of her, in the chair of the diner.
She watches the memory with her eyes not wide open but not shut either, like a wistful wind that sweeps through her straight hair. It’s greasy, she doesn’t know how to stop it from getting greasy, but that’s not the priority. Lamenting that her final, repetitive memory is finally foggy instead of fuzzy like all the rest of her nightmares, that’s her priority.
She sniffles a bit, rolling her shoulder that’s always been tense, won’t stop being tense because she’s a ghost, before she breathes onto the cup, creating the aforementioned fog that laps at her bones. She doesn't think ghosts have bones, but she’d kill to say it, to make herself believe she’s something she’s not, something she once was. She has the notion that she’s always hated it- living that is. It’s something all the older people say, and when she says older, she means from the 1900s, the 1800s, one of the people she met was even from the 1500s, no older than ten. She acts like it though; acts like she is because for some reason it’s okay to covet being anything but human in death.
Bills, commercials, those darned rats, the air of Portland especially, every single thing is worth being a ghost, to pass through the world as nothing more than people finding their way to a home that’s no longer theirs. There’s another notion that she’s supposed to be enjoying this, that she’s always wanted this, but she can’t linger on one without the other, so her mind’s consumed as the memory fades. It’s around the fifth, or fiftieth one that she’s had to see, and it’s become the quickest one yet that’s faded into a heap of misery.
It’s the memories, the places within the memories that ache her, that she cannot touch or be in because she’s trapped in Portland specifically. There is no hint of her being here, but she’s here nonetheless, and she’s trapped in the memories of a distant land, when she herself was distantly loving. She wasn’t distantly loved though, and she hates herself from the memories of faded tv screens, how she’s snapped at the people who cared for her, how she flinched form their touches, how she never truly knows what happened because she was so stuck up. Her house is the most cohesive place she gets, her room specifically. It’s without any decoration besides a few piles of books, a few addictions spread around with technology. A tablet, a computer, two phones, albeit one must be a handed down flip phone; or a burner she can’t quite pin how she got.
Her memories are quiet until they’re completely mute, and she’s left watching with no subtitles, no lips, no tearful eyes. She didn’t write this one in a journal like all the others, it’s too tender to be with the ink of her blood, instead it’s going to be forgotten just like the rest of her memories, and that feeling- the first one she felt with the warmth and the love as if she were a child culpable of it, it’s gone for her misery of loneliness. Eugenia’s free now, but at a cost she cannot remember.
There’s a loud noise and no matter how old she feels, she is just as unstable as a drunkard on a tight rope, and she jolts like electricity from a wire, pulling back to find the dishes clashing on the floor of this diner. The worker working behind the register eyes the few that have dropped from a stable table. They were in the middle, if Eugenia can remember correctly, and now that older woman with the cat eyeliner is espying his next actions, bare feet dug into the glass. Eugenia turns back to her cup of water that isn’t actually hers and she sighs as the memory is gone. No one loved her here; she’s just here and the memories will never belong to anyone else, not even her ghostly self. “What the fuck…” The worker mutters before he walks over to the mess, grabbing a broom and dustpan on the way. It’s not many, maybe three or four but there’s enough of pearly ceramic on the floor to crunch under even the slightest of pressure of his shoe’s toe. Eugenia is forced to draw her gaze away from the glass to the scene, watching the older woman watch him, looking at every freckle on his cheeks and every crease to his thirty-year-old brows. She’s fifty, and as much as it shows in her outfit, she could pass for so much younger. Could be Eugenia’s mother is she wanted, but she doesn’t.
“Y’know, this is something you should be doing.” Even if she doesn’t want to, the one wearing older clothes still acts as such, or maybe more an immature mother, an older sister instead. She hisses with a shake of her head as the worker paints his features with confusion, staring right ahead at the table where her hand clad with a ring rests. “Kids are supposed to have spunk like I did. You’re supposed to be mischievous; the timid ones are just pitiful.” She drags her gaze from him to her in an instant, and Eugenia is left to watch the faded hazel of her eyes, the darkness of purple to her lips and coils of her black hair bouncing as she sways with experience. She feels like a cool sister; Eugenia doesn’t even know if she’s had experience with sisters or siblings of any kind, but she does know a feeling when she gets one, and she knows to believe feelings over looks any day in her death. “But I think you care enough about yourself to not know what pity feels like.”
She hops off of the table with a point of her button-heels and sway of her beaded, asymmetrical dress. She lets the beads brush against her fingers with a ricochetting sound, somehow making music out of chaos before she elegantly saunters to Eugenia. She doesn’t know her name, but neither does the woman know hers, and neither do they ask each other for it. It might be a step too close to each other, or it just might be a step. Eugenia doesn’t have the human heart to beat for her, so she doesn’t ask with passion, she lets the unnamed woman be with her in this diner for the time being every so often. “So, why have you garnered any sense of your past yet?” Eugenia shakes her head nominally, letting her eyes flutter and chest harp with air that she doesn’t really need. “No. It’s old stuff; people doing things for me like kissing my head or checking in on me.” She hums in return. “So, you are more than shy, but a recluse.” Eugenia’s bushy black brows burrow into each other. “I didn’t even say what my response to them was.” She hums, but this time in amusement, letting her hand rest on the edge of the table. “That still doesn’t matter; you’re hauled up in a room in some place you cannot name, and you died in a room in some place you now name, but with the same technology.”
Her brows stay in their respective furrow, but her lips do mold into sort of a pouted purse from their thinness. “Well at least I had a family that cared.” There’s a clip to her lips of purple as she looks form Eugenia to the window, staring out as she responds, “Having a family that cares isn’t the same thing as one that indulges you day and night.” She straightens after her words, pushing her shoulders back in a way that’s unlike Eugenia’s terse shoulder and more like a rudimentary, blooming passion. “Regardless, if you stare into a larger body of water, you might get a greater body of image.” She looks back to Eugenia, done with partially using the window as a mirror for her being and her next act of life. “Okay, kid?” Eugenia lets her lips part, nodding her head and taking a breath to relax herself, revert to whom she was. “Welp, let the moon guide you and what not- Til next time Ted!” She waves back to the man tending to the glass, dumping it into a garbage can and then furrowing his brows at the wind that she waves to him.
Eugenia doesn’t know what fascinates her about him, but she doesn’t dare judge, doesn’t dare critique how the dead spend their time because she is dead, and she does more watching than the nameless woman ever will, and she does more acting than Eugenia will ever be confident in. She finds the nameless woman crossing the street, moving past the metallic luster of cars that hover above glitching black-and-white roads, and finding herself passing through the black-wooden door of another store in Portland. Eugenia doesn’t know much, but she does know music will always find that ghost, the passion that left her will always be there for her just like Eugenia’s memory will haunt her and never find her. She knows that as she finds her urn, a black, stout ruddy-stained box of wood, holding her ashes of dog, that little guy that was always in the back of her memories, always a yellow-white and always without a collar, but red is her color, would’ve been the color of her collar if she could’ve given it to her. It rests in there though, one she stole that was around the size of her neck, resting atop her ashes in a plastic bag. She takes it not only with her eyes, but her fingers finding the sides that stand with four pegs glued underneath.
She raises with a shove of her chair, letting her body make noise and draw the worker’s attention again. She holds her urn and watches him for a moment, his hazel eyes and the scrunch of his brows, the seeking in his eyes. Her tongue muses around her mouth, finding the stripes of her teeth to the flesh of her cheek, and then she looks to the water on the table. He’s staring at the chair, staring right through her at something she can be human in, sit on and gaze out of the window. She stares at the cup of water that is his and wonders why she can’t push it off of the table. Her thoughts are clouded, not by another memory that’s foggy or fuzzy, but by the bell chiming a top the door. There are boxes for a being, or at least for most of the being, there are boxes covering the being as it makes it’s way through the door. Eugenia gets one glance at the curls of her pink hair, and leaves the brown eyes alone with her steps of a ghost because really, when was she not shy?