It is strange to think that someone had cut your father open, flayed his muscles and cracked apart the interleaving of his ribs like he was some contentious puzzle that required solving. Did they weigh his heart? His lungs? His liver? The length of his intestines, still sour with the half-digested remnants of last night’s dinner? You have no idea how autopsies worked, only that they are a kind of bizarre intimacy, penetration and halogen-lit dissection, a baring of skin, meat, and spirit.

“You okay?”

You jolt like a fish on the line, mouth working soundlessly, before you discover the capacity to shape a platitude, display it on the arc of a thin smile. “I’m fine.”

You’re not. Not remotely. You’re uncertain if you ever will be, even though you suspect that time will, regardless of your input, ameliorate the grief that creases the margins of your consciousness like a word you can’t remember, or a song you can’t forget.

But no one wants to hear you’re not okay, only that you will be, can be, already are. People want to be useful, you think, as you pat the umpteenth shoulder with a tepid hand.

“I’m fine,” You repeat with greater zeal, coercing a smile that borders on real. “Honest.”

Your voice drains as you look up and over that faceless head, the fifth in a long line of well-wishers. In the distance, framed by the ebbing sun, a slant of trees bloodied with pink flowers, is your father.

As though to make up for his absence in life, your father’s ghost follows you everywhere. Never too close, never near enough to encapsulate in a hug, but never at a distance where you can justifiably ignore the knowledge of his presence.

He trails you into supermarkets but not public lavatories, cafes but not changing rooms, forever hovering outside the door, his face a blot of colors runnelling together, recognizable but not necessarily identifiable. At home, he occupies doorways, both ends of the stairwell, the foot of your bed. You quickly learn that he will leave you alone whenever you sleep on the couch, seemingly repulsed by the suffering his company incited, so you colonize the living room. A bad back is worth seven hours of bad sleep.

“I didn’t know you were close,” says a friend, an accusation inlaid in her low, breathy voice.

“It’s complicated,” you reply, uncertain, the explanation sticking in your throat. In the back of your head, an unhappiness amalgamates into words that sounded like how dare you, how could you, why would you. “I’ve always—”

You look up. In the periphery of your vision, your father’s ghost cocks his head, his features a flesh-colored smear. You breathe out.

“It’s complicated.” This wasn’t a lie.