33

There once was a girl who fell in love with a ghost. When she looked through him, she saw the world as it was made to be: warm, lush, aching with growth and quaking with tenderness. Through the boy, she saw the web of time, and how every moment—past, future, good, and bad—had conspired to tell their love story.

She loved the ghost boy so much that she thought the feeling alone might be enough to fix everything that had ever broken. In her. In him. In the whole world.

And because she loved him like this, she finally understood how deeply she was loved.

She knew she would do anything for the ghost boy. She would fold herself around him to protect him. She would drink out all the darkness from him and pour out all her light on him. She would rebuild the whole world for him.

One day, a voice spoke to her from above. Perhaps it came as a quiet whisper, carried on a gentle wind. Some say it was in the rumble of thunder or the crunch of stiff summer grass. Still others describe it as the delicate flutter of moth wings.

“My child,” the voice said. “It is I, Love, the maker of worlds. If you want the ghost boy to live again, bring him out beneath the moon tonight, and I will send Death down to trade your life for his.”

The girl loved the ghost boy so much that she felt only the smallest hesitation. There’s little to fear when you love. There’s nothing to fear when you are loved. So the girl took her ghost lover out into the valley beneath the moon that night and found Death’s own knife waiting for her. It was strange, that Death was not chasing her, coming to collect her, or swallowing her whole.

Instead the girl was standing beneath the stars, the soft breath of the grass warming her ankles, the heartbeat of the world thudding gently, devotedly against her feet, and the crickets singing a lullaby. She looked into her ghost boy’s eyes, and the softness of his smile filled her heart so quickly that it began to break as she brought the knife toward her chest.

The sky split open then.

The stars fell like silver rain.

The world stopped turning. The Universe held its breath.

The voice came again. “Stop. Set down Death’s knife. I’ve seen your heart and that you withhold nothing for yourself. You know my face. You recognize my love for you, as you know your own for the ghost boy. You know what you would do for him, and so you understand now that, for you, my beloved, I would fix the whole world.”

Then the moonlight fell down too: a brilliant sheet of white that cleansed the whole valley and left the world utterly dark, perfectly quiet as it was in the beginning, before all things. And in the dark, the girl fell into a dreamless sleep.

When she awoke next, the sun was starting to rise. Birds were singing. She remembered nothing, not the night before nor any night that came before it.

It was the first day of her life, and when she looked up the side of the valley, she saw a boy watching her. He looked familiar and unfamiliar at once, like someone whose vague notion she’d seen in a dream.

“I missed you,” she heard herself call to him—though was it possible to miss someone you didn’t know? Her chest hurt then, an immeasurable burst of pain.

“Every day,” he answered softly. “All the time.”

He came toward her, the early sunlight glinting off his skin and hair and eyes.