Page 3 of Ashen Souls

And it was waiting for me to realize it was looking back.

2

♫ BAND OF HORSES—IS THERE A GHOST

Ididn't wait for the shadow to move. I lunged for the bedside lamp, my hand slapping blindly at the switch. Harsh light flooded the bedroom.

The corner was empty.

I clicked the lamp back off and collapsed onto the pillows. Refusing to look toward that side of the room again, I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself into a few restless hours of sleep.

The next morning arrived flat.

I rolled out of bed, bone-tired, crossing the familiar slant of the floorboards toward the bathroom. I splashed freezing water over my face, pressing the heels of my palms into the deep, tender shadows beneath my eyes. Every muscle felt bruised.

Downstairs, the bakery was already in full swing. The heat of the industrial ovens hit me the second I pushed through the stairwell door, carrying the rich scent of burnt sugar and rising dough. It was a visceral kind of warmth. A comfort I didn’t have to negotiate for.

Outside, the sky hung low, swollen with the threat of rain. Vesbridge had an austere beauty, a gothic jaggedness that grew overwhelming if you stared too long. Weather-worn stone saints leaned from their alcoves like weary witnesses.

The fifteen-minute walk to campus wound beneath pointed arches and past ivy-veined stone that hoarded the shadows of the city. The air here was dense with the scent of old ink and rain-soaked wool.

The lecture hall was a cathedral of carved oak and echoing silence. I opened my notebook, trying to focus on literature. The professor paced at the front of the room, her chalk tapping a staccato, skeletal rhythm on the board.

“Liminal characters,” she said, underlining the phrase. “They exist in the thresholds, caught between worlds. Never fully claimed by either side. Their existence is defined by that tension.”

Between worlds.

The thought lodged in a place I hadn't given it permission to enter. I scribbled the words in the margin of my notebook, the nib of my pen biting so hard into the paper it nearly tore.

Across the table, Emma leaned over. “Do you get this part?” she whispered, pointing to a yellow-streaked passage of impenetrable jargon.

“It’s about transition. That suspended moment before the world shifts. The breath before the fall.”

She nodded, looking more relieved than enlightened, and turned back to her glowing screen.

Between lectures, I answered emails I didn’t care about, constructing responses about deadlines and graduation requirements. Whether in my inbox or in the university hallways, the same question kept surfacing: “So, what’s next?”

As if the universe handed out roadmaps to women who didn’t feel rooted in their own bodies. I smiled and told them I was still figuring it out. The truth was messier. I felt like I was endlessly circling the same city block, watching the same windows blur past, waiting for something to break the pattern.

That was why my Thursday nights turned into dates, and Fridays belonged to Harper and whatever crowded bar she picked. I moved through those crowds with far less conviction than she did, accepting drinks I never finished and smiling at men whose names dissolved by morning.

But Saturdays belonged to me.

It was the one day of the week no one framed my isolation as depression.

By noon, I was buried in an oversized sweater with a mug of mint and lemon balm tea. I lit candles along the windowsill, letting the apartment take on a golden glow, and opened a book.

Dark fantasy. Always. I convinced myself it was harmless escapism. But the truth pressed in closer every weekend: those violent, magical worlds didn’t feel like an escape. They felt like a place my mind recognized. In those books, the men didn’t ask what the heroine did for fun. They saw her before she understood herself. They wanted her rough edges, and they didn’t love politely. How could a human man who worried about quarterly growth compete with a monster who would burn down a world for her?

He couldn’t. Which was why the men I dated never lingered long enough to matter. I imagined stepping through the page, leaving this physical world and its quiet disappointments behind. Magic instead of restlessness. Fate instead of a five-year plan.

Not as a metaphor, but as a door.

My professors would say I romanticized too much. That fiction had warped my expectations, that real life was smaller. And that was fine. Love didn’t need spectacle to be real.

Some days, I believed them.

Other days, the thought of making peace with less felt like swallowing glass.