Days, weeks, we were only sinking into the incident a bit more. Marcy had forever vanished without that slight foreboding hint. We could just acknowledge it, she was less notable, more like a tool in a vacant seat.

Her family had more sons and daughters to consider. She was the one they've been dragging into social events and goading her face against the back of relatives to greet them with a wide grin, while they raise their noses and heedlessly engage in their own conversations. She was the one who was being told several times to smile, she was the invisible one who they believed was influenced by the devil because she preferred to lock herself in her room to listen loudly to garage rock. If they could ever choose from her brothers and sisters, she was more expendable.

And still she sank into me. I saw her last. I unintentionally took a mental picture and it fucking unnerved me.

We graduated. We could just keep going.

One thing I noticed about college is that the guidance office is a trivial office space right beside the faculty, more like an open confession booth while the counselor can behold you with all your mentally emaciated glory. Then they had to hire a smiling, fairly attractive one so concupiscent adolescent males could just fabricate their own mental illnesses just to get into that room.

One time I walked in and talked to her about Marcy. Marcy the class tool. The dwindling specter of a student that no one ever noticed. I talked about her like she had grown into me. Like we were friends.

Fabricating relationships to grasp that pathetic graze of attention from everyone's favorite MILF. It was a budding craze. I had to do it too.

You can just indulge yourself in the false hopes that the woman is into you, despite knowing that she puts on a sympathizing face whenever a student walks in to her office. Then you can just totter out grinning, heading to the next class relating to a course you didn't intend to take in the first place.

The thing is, I liked Marcy. She was this forlorn image of me that didn't put on a mask every day. She was a formidable companion to that groaning vestige that was supposed to be me. Too bad she's gone. Dead. Disposed without a trace. I don't know.

I had a job after graduation. Dull corporate jobs. Then I had to familiarize myself with any kind of software to confine myself at home and take freelance projects. We had the social media. That would suffice. That illusion of being there with your friends without actually being there. Thank God, or those haphazard nuclear war-paranoid science geeks, for the internet.

I could get out, at least, arm myself with a skateboard to one of those familiar spots, or attend one of those prearranged gig invites from one of my garage-rock/ heavy metal performing friends. I converse for a while then sit back home, check if they've uploaded those random, candid photos from the gig and see if I looked fairly decent. Slowly I was shedding that skin I've grown for years, I was building walls, enjoying my own company.

Then it was that text message. A birthday party, more like an unsophisticated shambolic gathering, from one of my alleged friends. I had to tear away from my bubble, be someone prominent again.

I took more than the usual dose of gin and beer. Sloppy move. I couldn't care less. I wanted to keep talking. Then after a series of boisterous chuckles and unnecessary virile cursing I called a day and headed home. Alone. Because, that, ladies and gentlemen, is how twentysomethings end up with knives in their throats.

And then here I am, staring straight into a familiar face, who walks up towards me in a hooded leather jacket and biker boots. Marcy, or the ghost of Marcy, looking at me, eyes sunken and gleaming, as though I baffled her as well, like the restless Banquo to Macbeth.

"Marcy," I constantly whispered, "Marcy, I'm sorry."

She propped me up my feet, lifted my chin up and gazed at the bleeding cut across my neck. The blood tricked down my collarbone. Her eyes gleamed, then her head cocked to the side and lowered.

I let out a distressed groan. She pressed my head harder against the wall. I felt her tongue slide across the cut in my throat.

I groped for her cheek, the only skin I could run my fingers into. She felt warm, like maddening, elating brume of toxin. For a ghost, she felt good.

Then suddenly, stepped back and briskly wiped her lips. Then that sudden blow that knocked me off my senses. The next thing I knew, I was at the corner of a hospital gate, scrubs yanking my hoodie up, asking if I was ok.

Was I dreaming? That skin against the tip of my fingers, the smell of her. No, I refuse to believe it.