AnYi 安亦

The thing about suicide is, nobody understands or cares until you’ve actually died. At least that’s how Jimmy found out about it.

There was a moment that felt quite surreal, somewhere between fire and water, a mixture of pain, pleasure, and numbness – and then that was it, he was looking at the world through a slightly misty lens, well over the whole living business, and quite comfortably dead.

‘I like that.’ Was his first comment on the new vision of the world. Everything was less acute than it had been when he was still alive. The pain didn’t go away, but it was subdued to a manageable level, as he watched them discover his body and start making phone calls. It was all greyish and blurred. He couldn’t quite make out the faces of those gathering around him, but he recognised his sister, Jo. She was probably crying, but he couldn’t see it. Something inside him twitched as he realised how he had broken Jo’s heart. She had never wanted him dead. He knew that. But his emotions were also marked with the blurry, misty lens, and he couldn’t find them as easily as he used to, so he let these shadows of guilt float away.

He was dead now, and everyone should be satisfied, right?

The next twenty-five years were both excruciatingly long and short for Jimmy, as a ghost. There were some other ghosts he got along with, but most of the time they were too lost in the mists to pay much attention to each other. There were, of course, ghosts that he didn’t care for that much, but again they were not there to form any relationship, either. For some reason the living people he had once known remembered about him because of the suicide. Apparently, his death hit the news and later became a trigger for a national campaign on mental health awareness. His long-abandoned Instagram page was flooded with comments and messages and hashtags of all sorts. They even made a film about it, about ten years after his death, and the actor they cast to play his dad was one that he had always liked. He missed all these, of course, as the mists got in the way too often and it was quite impossible to make out what was going on in the world of the living. Being a ghost was not quite as what he had imagined – most of them had never thought about the invisible line drawn between their worlds. No, you don’t just automatically get to peep into people’s lives unnoticed when you become a ghost. Jimmy found out later that it was quite the opposite: most of the time you just wander around, sometimes with other ghosts, only half-aware of what was going on, but there always are occasions when the living bump into you, completely out of the blue, and then you feel you’re in pieces again. All the suffering comes back to you as if you were still alive. For a moment you get a clear, steady vision of the living world, and then go back to being dead again.

So being a ghost wasn’t easy, but Jimmy made the best of it.

And then one day Jo showed up.

It turned out she died in a quite conventional way. Heart attack. It took her life almost in no time, and directly she shot through the mists in front of Jimmy. She stopped as she saw him.

‘So, you’re a ghost now.’ said Jo. ‘I knew there were times you were hanging around.’

‘It’s not easy to go unnoticed.’ Jimmy thought he sounded quite apologetic, for some reason. ‘We spend so much time unfocused and lost, not knowing where we end up sometimes.’

Jo looked at him, and smiled a little. Her face was sad. ‘I am sorry, Jimmy, for everything that had happened. I hope you are happy now.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Jimmy, but he was already fading back into the misty blurriness, and felt hardly half as much as he was trying to feel through Jo’s words.

‘Goodbye, Jimmy.’ Said Jo, as she continued to shoot up in to the skies. Jimmy was still there, but he was already gone, and didn’t hear or see her leave.