I am a ghost. My body is the phosphorescent glow of the ever after, a concentrated shell of the shell I used to be. My form is quiet in this live world, a blur in the clarity of the colors that fill life. See blue, I'm pink. My shadow is the gray blur of every color and it no longer follows me. I say hello because she's holding my hand, guiding me.

She tells me she's been watching me, sharing me. She's felt the laughter, the tears. She filled the night, covering my fears in her blanket, only stopping at my dreams. She listened when I said nothing. She heard my dreams echo in a smile; the nightmares sitting in the salty remains left on my pillow. She heard those words that never spoke for themselves. She's sitting on the brown paper palisade and we're watching the stars go by. Black is the night and she tells me the stories I already know, but they are written on her forehead, her face, her legs, her arms, her fingers.

Her many colors gray sift in the way I look at her and I find that the words she's speaking are what make her. She exists in the little lines of writing that cover her forehead. But, I can't read them. She has to read them to me because the writing is too small and too crowded. There are too many colors, some bright, some dull. Jewel tones and pastel tones and flighty tones that won't give color. They all are she and they make her gray.

She tells me it's my turn to follow now.

The sky is cloudy, but the world seems brighter in the dead time than the life time. The food smells sweeter, the air is warmer, the grass is greener even in the rain, but we can't touch any of it. Like a strange joke, the world is more beautiful this way, like many of life's colors died and only the dead can see them. We saw them as they should have been. My shadow pinches me as I gawk at a raindrop.

I follow in the footsteps my shadow makes and she takes me to the rain clouds. She set me down in the misty air and it firms beneath my translucent bones like a pillow. We look up at a blue atmosphere with the edges of the world deepening into night at the corners of the sky.

Sunshine burns rainbows in my eyes, like opalescent gates before a threshold. My shadow tells me the world is in a word and that word was spoken. The world is written in words, just like she. Light. Earth. Heaven. Death. I ask her why I died. She tells me I didn't.

She says, "We'll have wings one day."

I ask her when that is.

My shadow and I sit on the top of the world and silence sits there with us. We sit and wait for the sun to set and a world to be made new.