We met every Tuesday after that and it soon became a ritual—not out of obligation, like brushing your teeth or apologizing after stepping on someone's foot. Not even like a habit, like checking your phone in the middle of conversations.
It was more like gravity. I didn't decide to go behind the vending machine—my legs did. Like they had already voted and left my brain out of the loop.
She never said she'd be there. I never asked. But 4:45 arrived—like clockwork.
Or fatework.
She was always already there, sitting, smiling, like waiting wasn't sad but a sport she happened to be good at.
She never offered her name. As per her, names were like stickers—you peel them off too many times and the glue gives out.
We talked about nothing. And by "nothing," I mean everything you'd never think to discuss with a ghost.
"Do ghosts sleep?"
"Not unless we want to waste eternity."
"Do ghosts feel cold?"
"We are cold."
"Do ghosts fall in love?"
"Only with people who forget us later."
Those were her answers. I don't know if they were true, but they were consistent—and somehow consistency is more comforting than truth when you're talking to a dead girl with good posture. She didn't talk like a ghost or like a girl. She talked like a Tuesday that didn't want to end.
Once, I brought her a book. A novel about time travel. She read it quickly, skipping pages like skipping stones, but she never turned the last one.
"Endings are dangerous," she said. "They turn stories into conclusions. I'm not done being a draft."
Some days, we sat in silence and on others, she asked me weird questions.
Sometimes it would be deep, like: "Do you think memories taste different once you forget the bad parts?"
Or sometimes it was random, like: "Do vending machines dream of expired tea?"
And once: "Do you think it's better to be remembered wrong than not at all?"
I didn't have answers to those and she didn't want them. One time, I asked her why she was stuck here.
Why this place? Why this machine? Why this one lousy shoe?
"I guess... I just left something behind. Something that remembered me."
"Your shoe?" I asked.
She blinked. "No. Maybe."
"Then what?"
She paused for so long I thought the scene would end. And then she said:
"Actually, I do remember falling."
"From where?"
She looked up. Not with fear or with nostalgia but with detachment.
"From being remembered."
Indeed, ghosts don't haunt places. They haunt unfinished thoughts.