How many ghosts can you see in just one minute inside your own house? Many people would say none, others would suspect they have seen something, some would be sure they have seen something by the corner of their eyes and Art just dealt with his grandma and her cat — alive? No, of course not, they were six feet under, but they looked very much alive to him. He didn't have to suspect he had seen something, he saw it, every single day, from the moment he woke up until the moment he went to sleep.

“Is he talking to himself?” Someone would whisper a little too loudly, looking at him with that expression bordering on laughter. “Don't mind, he's a weirdo.” Someone else would respond, already laughing at him. He remembered very well the words he had heard since his childhood, be seen that way didn't even seem so offensive after a few long years dealing with it.

The first time someone paid attention to his behavior was when the other kids didn't want to play with him in kindergarten and were afraid of him because he talked and laughed to himself in the playground. Some of these kids even cried and said that the toys in the sandbox moved around him, that he played with a girl they couldn't see named as Shelly and always asked shelly not to pull the girls' hair. Obviously, there was no Shelly in the class, but there was another Shelly... A little girl who choked on a piece of apple and the teachers couldn't save her in time. It had been ten years, there was no way little Art would've known about her, but he did.

At first, his parents took him to psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, a truckload of diagnoses and no effective solutions, until he grew up and realized that his problem just had no cure, he was a failure with a defective brain — as his dad would say — and he just accepted it. No one should see people and animals that are already gone, right? This wasn't normal, so he wasn't normal, and there was nowhere to run, not if the weirdos knew he could see them. Oh, sure... He redefined the word.

Art was a lonely boy, bullied and constantly left out by his classmates, just when he thought he was starting to get used to things, they thankfully changed. It wasn't the biggest change, but a friend for someone who never had one was something. You came into his life and he felt accepted for the first time, you didn't make fun of him, you laughed with him and made him feel better when he felt the worst. You were the one who showed up at his house at exactly midnight to be the first person to wish him a happy sixteenth birthday, you were the one who broke your wrist after punching one of the boys who was bullying him, you were the one who took care of him when he was drunk so his parents wouldn't know he had gotten too drunk at seventeen.

He just didn't expect it all to happen so fast. In front of his house that Saturday morning, you had just celebrated your birthday, and suddenly, you'd never have another one. A car speeding by... You were gone instantly, right there. They told him it was horrible, but he didn't want to see it, not at all, he didn't even want to think about it — his best friend had passed away, and there was nothing he could do about it; he only hoped that you hadn't suffered for a single second.

For many months, he couldn't stay at home; he had to go to his uncles' house in the mountains while he tried to clear his head. He knew what would happen when he returned home, and he wasn't sure if he was ready to deal with it, to deal with the fact that you — who had always taken care of him — would become a ghost. The only person who ever believed in him... Was no longer a person, how ironic.

But, he came back anyway, and when he entered his room, he saw the translucent figure sitting on the floor, knees crossed exactly as you did, and eyes fixed on the door as if waiting for him. “I'm sorry.” He didn't want to say "hi", or ask how you were doing, he needed to get it off his chest. “I'm sorry for leaving you here alone after... all of this. I... was just broken without you... physically here.”