I turn to walk away. My bare feet sink into the damp grass, but no matter how many steps I take, the landscape remains the same. The clouds don’t move gently across the sky, the hills on the horizon don’t come any closer.

“Don’t you see?” he asks. I turn and he’s right behind me.

I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.

When I wake, Oliver is breathing gently beside me. I stare at the dark ceiling and I try not to panic.

Oliver doesn’t mention the dark circles under my eyes until a few weeks later at dinner. “Have you been sleeping?” he asks kindly, passing me the bread.

I shrug, noncommittal.

“You did the right thing. Even he knew that.”

He.

That’s who he is between us. Finn’s name is never spoken aloud.

It’s only when I’ve convinced myself I’ve imagined the whole thing that I find Finn waiting for me again. He smiles like the sunrise as I appear in front of him, but it’s a little broken at the edges.

“This is happening, then,” I greet him.

“It appears so.”

And so, the dreams continue. He’s not there every night. Not even every week, but he never goes away. My own personal ghost.

“What do you do when I’m not here?” I ask one night. We’re lounging against the grass, and Finn has magicked cups of steaming tea into our hands. Sometimes we play cards. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t talk at all.

He shrugs. “I wait for you.”

“That sounds horrible.” If Finn is my personal ghost, he’s trapped in his personal purgatory.

He sets his teacup down in the grass and turns to face me. “You want to know something? I was twelve years old the first time I saw you in my head, and I knew then my life’s purpose was to find you. I would’ve gone to the ends of the earth. And if you weren’t there, then I would have kept walking. Everything was for you. It was always about you.”

I shake my head with pity. “And look at you now, stuck here at the ends of the earth forever.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“I’m with you, aren’t I?”

If Oliver is a warm hearth, Finn is a house on fire. In my dreams, it’s easy to imagine the flames feel like home. Love and pain are so intertwined, sometimes I can’t tell the difference when I look at him.

In my waking hours, life marches on. I finish my first semester of classes at Barnard. I get a new class of students. The carrots growing in the patch outside the kitchen are picked and the earth is turned over. The dirt is cold in my hands, sharp as it gets stuck under my fingernails.