I am searching for Kasey Lavoe, and I will keep searching until I find her. In five minutes, she’s freed up all of the hope I’d been burying for centuries, the hope that anything can ever change. Just by existing, she has changed everything. She left in a car when she quit the cemetery, that night when I first saw her. I cannot keep pace with a car, and I possess no notion of where she was going. So, alas, I found myself reduced to waiting and hoping that she comes back. Every night, I sat waiting on her grave, but she did not return. I crisscrossed the cemetery, I paced its outer edges, but the only one who comes is the young man, two days after I started waiting.

He came in mourning, in the rain. He is not the same red-headed one I saw her with before, but this is hardly surprising. A woman like Ms. Lavoe would have many interested suitors, many to come weep at her grave. This man had dark brown hair, sad blue eyes, and a handsome cut to his jaw. He wore a cap. I had watched from behind her headstone as he sat cross-legged on her plot, wore his pain on his face, and said:

“I’m so sorry, Kasey. I should have been here.”

He sat quietly there in the rain for a long stretch, before getting up, scribbling something on a map, and setting off. This strange encounter is the only one to come of my watch over Kasey’s headstone. Waiting is not paying off. So, now I am searching.

I searched the church at the bottom of the hill, to see if any materials were left over from her memorial service. There were none. For days - weeks? time is a strange thing to me now - I walked up and down the familiar streets of Ketterbridge. I lapped the same boulevards I’ve walked year after year, on the off-chance I might run into her or hear someone say her name. I must be looking in all the wrong places, for I cannot find her again.

Horrible possibilities frame the edges of my thoughts, waiting for an opening to work their way into my focus. Maybe Ms. Lavoe can leave Ketterbridge, as I cannot. Maybe she already left. Maybe her spirit only lingered for a few days after her death before dissipating. Who knows how any of it works? The only example I have is myself, and I have little more knowledge than anyone else on the matter.

Perhaps there has been some final crack in the walls of my sanity, and I imagined her altogether. Perhaps there is no Kasey Lavoe. Perhaps I’ll return to the cemetery and find her name on none of the headstones. But I will not give up so easily.

I need to clear my head and make a plan before I begin searching again, so I go someplace where I often spend time. It used to be part of the mill, but now it’s an empty lot. It’s quiet, calm, safe. I may be unable to sleep, but I can stretch out there and close my eyes and imagine I could. I lay my invisible body out on the grass, unable to feel even one stalk. The wind gusts through the trees, rustling their summer leaves. The stars overhead glimmer peaceably.

“Maybe he’s making a treasure map. Should we start digging?”

Jolting upright as the clear, high voice echoes across the lot, I’m hit with an eyeful of brilliant color: harvest gold and citrus orange and deep crimson. Her rippling halo of energy, her sunlight. There she is, just landing on the grass, apparently having leapt the fence. And next to her, the man who drives the little blue car she’d vanished into. They are both here, and walking around the lot as if they’re looking for something. The man answers her comment about the treasure map, and she answers him, too, but I am temporarily deaf to everything. I can only watch her in mute amazement. What is she doing here?

I hurry to my feet, though neither of them has noticed me. I have been looking everywhere for her, yet here she is, come straight to me. I move closer to her as she comes to a stop, turning to say something to her living companion. I hear her call him a name: Jamie.

“Ms. Lavoe,” I whisper. “You found me.”

She doesn’t hear. Why would she? She could not last time. I’ve been searching for her without so much as a thought as to what I might do when I found her. I can’t lose her again.

“See me,” I beg her. I move directly into her line of sight. As I draw this close, her warmth blankets me again; I gasp at the sensation, so gentle and soothing and yet almost shocking purely for being a sensation at all. I suddenly remember things I thought I’d completely forgotten: a toasty piece of bread after a long, cold shift. Sunlight on the back of my neck. The heat of a fireplace seeping through my socks. Fragments of memories and feelings so long ago forgotten. Thawed by her warmth. My mind whites out for a moment.

It’s enough to drive me to my knees before her.

“Sakes alive,” I breathe, staring up into her shining face. My heart swells, and some force of energy moves through me, as if I took her warmth and put it back out. I feel it spread around me. The tree nearest me suddenly makes a snapping noise, as if a branch were about to fall. The wind? Me? I don’t know. I’ve never been able to affect anything physical since they put me in the ground, but I haven’t felt warmth since then, either. Could it be? Shock cements me to the spot. 

Kasey Lavoe and her friend go over to the tree and peer up into its branches. They decide that nothing is there before I am capable of doing anything again.

“Shall we follow the line?” she suggests.

I don’t know what this means, but apparently her companion does, because they both make for the front of the lot. They’re leaving. My heart sinks, and I race to the fence, passing through it easily. Maybe if I start running now, I can get ahead of the car, or-

But there is no car. The two of them simply set off together down the sidewalk, holding hands. Clearly Jamie is the suitor she prefers, then. Bad news for the sad-eyed lad who came to see her grave. It’s pitch black outside, late at night, and yet. Off they go, on foot. Which means that for once, I can follow. I don’t even think about where we’re going, so caught up am I in the overwhelming excitement of her presence, her return...

When I look up and see that we are stopped on Benton Street, I almost fall over again. The two of them are looking around like they expect to find something.

“Are you sure this is the-?” Kasey begins, and Jamie cuts her off.

“Yes. We walked all night for no reason. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, at least we got some fresh air.”

“Come on,” he sighs. “Let’s go back.”

I did not stop to think about why either of them would be visiting the empty lot we just came from. But this is too much to be a coincidence, isn’t it? We’re stopped directly in front of the place where I once lived. Is - is she looking for me? I try to find my voice again, which I’m still getting used to. It’s like trying to play an instrument that’s gone unused for two centuries. The sound of it is unfamiliar even to me.

“Ms. Lavoe, wait! Are you looking for me? I’ve been looking for you!” She begins walking, and so does Jamie. “No, no, wait, wait, please, Ms. Lavoe-”

Some ancient muscle memory takes over, and though it strikes me as far too bold, I dash directly through her friend and try to grab her hand in mine. It doesn’t work, of course. My fingers, unseen by either of us, simply coast straight through hers. And yet - she stops. With every screed of effort within me, I try to channel everything into the place where our fingertips meet -

“Do you feel that?” she asks, and my spirit soars.

“I don’t feel anything.” Jamie shivers. “Can we keep going? It’s cold.”

“You feel cold?” she responds. “I feel suddenly almost - warm.”

“That’s me!” I hear my own voice rising, the way it breaks in its excitement. “I’m right here, I feel you, too-”

I gasp and double over. Her warmth is suddenly fleeing me, leaving a tepid, yawning emptiness in its wake. I get the sense that in breaking through and somehow returning her warmth, I expended not only the energy she gave me, but also all of the energy that makes me up. I feel like less than nothing. I feel like I might fade away, a wisp on the wind. It took my everything, for those three seconds of warmth. My sight blurs, grows blindingly bright.

By the time I am restored enough to see and hear again, she and Jamie are gone. No trace remaining. It is midday, and I have no notion of how much time it took me to recover. I may have been here for days, or only a few hours.

“Goodness gracious,” I mutter, staring off down the street where she vanished. “That… is a right-on woman.”

She felt me. I felt her. We felt each other. She was on what used to be my street. She visited what used to be my work. She smiled when I reflected some of her warmth back at her. I can think of no reasonable way she should know of me, or even know of the man I was when I lived. It makes no sense. And yet, a new possibility unfolds in my mind like a sweet, blossoming flower:

I am not searching for her. Somehow, some way, we are searching for each other.