I stare at your page like a lone death mask, etched in your eerie likeness and scattered among the throngs of the living. It’s all there, everything factual about you: how old you were, where you were born, your graduating class. I look through pictures of you and friends, smiling and laughing amongst one another without the grim shadow of oblivion about you. Your final writings reveal nothing profound, the scribbled, last minute thoughts before an unforeseen end. In the eyes of any other, you’re still there, working in a diner, listening to music, hanging with friends, and having a complicated relationship while remaining interested in men. But the numerous lamentations of friends and loved ones written upon your wall pay testament to the loss of you, a life cut short and randomly, leaving nothing behind but a hollow visage bearing your smile, your eyes, your face, and a colder world; the electronic ghost of you.

As a babe, I never knew you, and the world was darker for it. Shadows loomed about me like hungry jackals and I hid near the smallest scrap of light I could find. It would be as a young child that I would first see you shyly peeking at me through forest trees, the bright luminescence of your unearthly, child like form drawing me to you like a moth to the flame. Before I can see you in full, you disappear from view, your insecurity getting the better of you. As a young man, I saw you by a lakeside in the snow covered forest, no longer a young child as I, but a young woman with a pale, curved leg, bared naked and beautiful as it reflects off the still, unfrozen water. Yet you still hide from me, my lovely Artemis, disappearing as I come closer to you. It is only as a man that you finally present yourself in full to me, donning a silky white gown that brightens the whole world in the warm, spring air. We dance across the stars, your elegance blinding and binding me to you, making me eternally yours. The seasons pass, the days fly by, and before I know it my body has become old and crooked. You’ve become thin and sharp, but remain elegant as ever as I notice you beginning to fade away into darkness. I ask myself how I can live without you, for you’ve been my eternal partner, furtively glancing at me from between trees and twirling with me among the loving cold of space. But soon my world begins to fade into darkness as well…and the question melts away from my mind.