Emails from Ghosts

The email came in at 3:19 a.m. — the kind of time when ghosts might decide to speak, or chairs crack their joints. It was sandwiched between the confirmation of my impulsive midnight purchase — a deodorant in a sleek silver metal casing, dotted with blue stars, requiring eco-friendly paper cartridge refills — and another email from a team begging me to finish the survey I’d abandoned halfway through.

For my deodorant, I’d picked the Thunderstorm cartridge, but still couldn’t sleep. Sitting on the floor with my laptop still open — because big purchases require a big screen, so I can see exactly what I’m doing — I had my knees pulled up to my chest, scrolling through the day’s newly released albums. The screen lit up softly, casting a faint light in the otherwise dim room.

The subject, Something I Think You Should Know, looked like one of those scammy emails that somehow escape the spam folder and sneak into your inbox, designed to trick you into clicking. Yeah? Like what? How much CO₂ I’m producing daily? Or how I’m falling behind in the crypto world? I was about to shut the laptop when I caught sight of the sender’s name.

Julian Rivers.

Oh boy, it really WAS the hour when ghosts decided to talk. But I saw myself as one of those rational people — the kind who puts in their earbuds, sings along to a song, and pretends they didn’t hear a thing. That’s what I planned to do with Julian: a box in the attic of my mind that I’d sworn never to open again. The dead boy of my life who was supposed to stay silent.

My stomach twisted. The rational part of my brain screeched like a trapped mouse: Just delete it!

I clicked the email.

Read it. Probably two and a half times, if you count all the moments when my eyes raced too fast over the lines, only catching bits that made my heart pound. It was an apology. Maybe. Or the closest thing you could call an apology email from Rivers.

I didn’t hit reply. Not that night, not the nights after, and not even in the weeks that followed. Even though I had a phone full of my collection of unsent messages of a forsaken lover, any of which could’ve worked as a response. Like the one titled A Letter to You, which started like this:

You’ll never read this because you and I don’t talk anymore.

But this? This could’ve been the reply I’d saved for the day you randomly showed up.

Unlikely, sure, but I had to write it to keep myself from exploding.

You know… I’m sorry, but I got mad at you. And you didn’t reach out. And I stayed mad so long that I forgot what it’s like any other way.

Probably, if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night, tried to cut short the fur of my nonexistent cat without permission, couldn’t find it, and then decided to search my phone for your name in my notes, it would be a real disgrace. The things they’d find.

U know Rivers, 

I keep forgetting the promise I made to myself.  

I think of you, and my heart drops, and my entire body tightens.  

And then I remember that I promised to let go of my love for you, so it could live on its own like a living being, I promised to just let it flow like a river through my heart.  

I’m just tired to fight it, too tired to try to kill it.  

So I’ll just love you, okay? Sorry, love, but I do, and it seems like there’s nothing less I can do.  

Or maybe the newest one, the one that practically writes itself in my head:  

You know how long I waited for you to become yourself again—your *old* self—and call me, or reach out to me somehow? And when it finally happened, it didn’t even matter anymore?  

In the email titled Something I think you should know, you guessed I wouldn’t reply. You even said you’d understand if I didn’t, so I didn’t exactly feel guilty about not responding. After we got through the first year without speaking, I figured we could do it every year. But in the last line, you’d written:  

There’s something I think you should have back.

I thought about that one a lot. After more than three years, what could you possibly have of mine? A scarf? An old sweater? A notebook I don’t even remember?  

At the start of the new week, a new email from Julian arrived. This one didn’t have any preamble, no long-winded paragraphs, just a single sentence and an attached photo: Khepri, the most adorable dog in the world, who could do to even the coldest heart what a warm skillet does to butter, was looking into the camera. Above the photo, Julian had written: Thought you might want him back.

I stared at the photo over and over, feeling like Julian’s hand was reaching out of his grave.  

(Only to shove it back into my chest and mess with the red, fragile thing beating there.)  

Despite the now louder, sharper screams from the rational part of my brain, my hands moved over the keyboard.  

We agreed to meet in neutral territory—a small café on the edge of the city that meant nothing to either of us. I couldn’t silence the alarms in my head, couldn’t convince myself that nothing terribly disastrous was happening and that Julian was simply, after all these years, returning his beloved Khepri —our beloved Khepri —to me. I knew he wouldn’t abandon him on the streets, but if THE only other option was the painful choice of asking me, then something must have happened.

When he sits across from me, he’s a version of Julian Rivers with his dark blonde hair cut as short as it can go, glancing around with a kind of anxious vigilance.  

“Where’s Khepri?” I ask.  

“Sorry, things are kind of messy,” he says. “I couldn’t bring him. I mean, I would’ve had to switch a few lines and move fast. Too fast.”  

I tilt my head slightly, wondering if he’s in some kind of trouble, but I don’t ask. It’s none of my business. Julian, as far as I’m concerned, is a ghost outside my house, and I’m not about to look out the window.  

He reaches up, out of habit, to rake his fingers through his hair, but with nothing much left up there, his hand just brushes over his scalp.  

“I just… gave myself a faraway endpoint because I couldn’t take living,” he says. “But the closer I got to it, the brighter the blinking lights got on the number at the end of the road. So, I reached this place where I only had four years left. To do all the things that were supposed to be the marks J. Rivers left on the world. And I figured I’d be the asshole of this story if I spent four years pretending everything was fine and then, out of nowhere, just jumped off the edge of the living world.  

“I’m sorry. For the way, I ruined everything we had between us.”  

He hands me a set of keys, the keychain dangling from it a ninja turtle charm that used to be mine, one he’d liked too much so I gave it to him. Its little arms are broken now.  

“This is the key to the house,” he says. “Khepri’s there. I hope you go get him because he doesn’t have anyone but us. And now, probably just you.”  

A day and a coffee later, the excitement of seeing the creature I’d written off as one of Julian’s friends I’d never have in my life anymore again, and the worry that he might be left alone and hungry, outweighed the indifference I’d painstakingly taught myself to feel toward Rivers.  

His house felt like the flow of its existence had been interrupted. As if Julian wasn’t there anymore, but he’d vanished abruptly. Like disappearing during the commercial break of a movie.  

My sweet Khepri, my sun-beetle, is so excited to see me that he almost knocks us both over. I give him some of his favorite treats I brought along and hang my scarf by the door.  

I look into his eyes, I’m surprised. They don’t ask me why I left him. They’re just overflowing with joy.

There’s a red notebook on the small table next to the couch, swollen with a pen left wedged between its pages. Seeing the notebook—identical to the one I’d ordered for myself just last week—nearly freezes me for a moment. Either we’d both been targeted by the same ads, or we existed on some painfully similar frequency.

Normally, what I was about to do wasn’t something I would allow myself to do. Not because I’m some inherently good person—though that’s part of it, even if it’s not a very charming thing to admit out loud—but because I don’t like to see the things I shouldn’t about the people I love. I don’t snoop. I don’t peek into open closets, unlocked phones, or abandoned notebooks. But Julian’s house smelled like him, mixed with something unfamiliar, something sad and dangerous.  

Khepri climbs onto the bed and sits next to me as I lie on my side. We stare into each other’s eyes, both looking at the same thing. Missing her.  

Sharing a dog with someone is a bad idea. Now stretch that and apply it to a heart.

I run my hand over his head, and Khepri’s eyes grow sadder. Khepri, who’d gotten used to two pronunciations of his name, never heard the one with the real “Kh” again. Just like you never saw your reflection in your rivers again.  

My hands are so cold it feels like the fingers holding the notebook are made of marble. I can feel all the blood pooling somewhere in my chest as if it’s trying to keep my heart beating.

I have a note on the phone in the pocket of my coat, one that could snap into this piece of writing like a puzzle piece finding its place.

I name my dog Khepri.

The symbol of the rising sun, of new life that endlessly emerges from its own essence, being born again and again. It’s inherently tied to the sun’s cycle and Ra’s nightly journey through the Duat, the Egyptian underworld. The name comes from the Egyptian verb *ḫpr*—pronounced roughly as *Kheper*—meaning transformation, rebirth. The root of so many words about creation and change. It’s also what they call the scarab beetle, its hieroglyph is forever linked to this deity.

I name him Khepri just to hear Jules’s unbearably sweet and innocent way of saying it, leaving off the “Kh” entirely.

This time, I send an email. I ask if he can explain, in no uncertain terms, what the hell he’s doing.

The little number next to the envelope icon ticks up by one.

I’m dead, Sara.

I thought it was what I wanted. So I did disappear. I got forgotten. Suddenly and exactly as I’d planned it. I slipped into the realm of erasers, and now I’m drifting toward the forgotten realm. Everything I ever was, everything I ever left behind, is vanishing, as though I never existed. It’s one of those fates that feels like something straight out of a fantasy story, doesn’t it?

I hoped... I mean, I really tried to save Khepri. It happened so fast and I couldn’t let him…

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

I can feel tears filling up my eyes. 

+ So how are you even talking to me? 

– There’s this old computer here. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they let you use it.

+ Like that story about the guy who called from the afterlife on a pay phone?

– Yeah, kind of. The tech is always a little outdated here. I don’t know if that’s intentional.

+ You can use it whenever you want?

– Not exactly. But this apprentice Eraser kind of liked me, and because I’m still standing on the line, gave me limited access to the computer. And one ticket for a quick trip back. But I’ve used it all now. I’m almost out of time. Soon, I’ll have to take the journey of the night.

+ Julian, why use it on me?

For a while, the number beside my emails stays unchanged.

-Why send you the email? I told him about you, and he asked me, Did you apologize? And I told him, I don’t think an apology can change anything. Why you? Because I’ve never been able to love anyone or anything the way I loved you. Just like I’ve never been able to let go of what we had. 

I almost laugh. A strange laugh, sharp and jagged, escapes my throat.

There’s a piece of paper tucked inside Septology, the book I was reading last winter, and on it, I’d scribbled:

But I think it’s unfair unless every time he thinks of me, his heart hurts just as much. Hurts so bad the way the entire world tilts and collapses like an hourglass pouring everything toward him.

As if, in the end, the universe really were fair. Hah.

+ You’ve not been able to let go of the Julian in this world either; you don’t really want to leave, do you, Jules? Not now. Not so soon.

No response.

But I send another email.

“I thought you were joking about the years you had left. You only mentioned it once, when we were rafting at the border of Chile and Argentina, right in the middle of the river’s wildest stretch. You said you were glad you tried it in the five years you had left. I thought you just meant growing up. The constant trip through your twenties. I’m sorry I didn’t get it."

A few seconds later, a notification pops up on my screen:

The email address you tried to reach does not exist.

On the last page of the red notebook, the one where the pen was left behind, he was talking to someone.

Save me.

Save me, and I promise I’ll be worth it.

His messy handwriting twists something deep inside me. It’s like he left me a message from another world.

Khepri looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes I can’t ignore. My silent translator, the part of me that understands him without spoken words—whispers: “Well? Now what?”

 I uncap the pen and draw a Kheper.

I clutch the red notebook to my chest and run out the door. Without a word from me, Khepri is already ahead, running into the night, leading me. I shout, “You know where he is, don’t you?”

He doesn’t answer. He just runs. I don’t know exactly what’s waiting for me, but it doesn’t really matter.

old on, Rivers. Just hold on. 

Ding

My emails tick up by one. 

I was afraid I couldn’t cross the line because I let you down, so I sat frozen in the taxi, and we drove toward the sunset, to begin the night journey. But there was a scarab on the window, and through its golden body, I saw beyond the line. It was bright.

I asked the driver, “Am I dead Sir?”

He said, “No, kid. But we’re driving toward the night.”

So I opened the taxi door and ran.

Toward the line.

Toward you.

𓆣