I found her, rusted, and we were sixteen.

I didn’t take her picture, but her photographer’s long forgotten her.

Maybe it’s that sweet plainness, her willowy hair, the upside-down pear of her head. The treble clef lock between her brows. Two eyes and a close-lipped smile on her soft and blurry face, like cotton with no whetted leaves; the quiet kind, so familiar — she’s the type I would’ve fallen for back then, the type I still would. And yet, when I ask about her, almost no one knows who she is.

I am a girl who has never kissed a girl and it’s because I chose not to — I’ve never kissed a boy, either, and none of them were locked behind photographs.

But there’s sacrilege in that, isn’t there. The touch.

It’s an act of sharpness, of nails, of piercing, and there will always be the question of who breaks first, who will crumble, who will melt, and maybe that’s why I find her so beautiful — enveloped in a photo, unable to touch me. Unable to be touched by me.

I keep running and hope I slur into the crowd. When I slip into a room, I do not swallow. I do not spit. I emit no light, I want to emit nothing at all.

Please, don’t give me the chance. Don’t let me ruin it, Lord. And to this day I’m not sure that anyone’s seen me, not really.

And so I wither, more transparent every year. But she, her, she stays — owly-eyed and smooth — immortal — right where God left her, where the sepia of that film absorbs all of her time. She’s a bronzed, polished relic, a Canaanite idol wrapped in brown and amber.

I’ve never been any shade.

But I know if she had been my classmate at sixteen, if she had smiled at me, close-lipped and gentle, I would have strangled myself. I’d cram ghost hands in my neck, pulled into bouquets, peonies would bulge from me, pushing against my throat, clogging my words before I could say, “your handwriting is gorgeous.” It would have come out eventually, in my voice that never stops twitching, never falls into an extreme, and she would have smiled and wondered why I was so odd. I would have scratched my arms and they wouldn’t have bled, and I would wonder if maybe I was harmless after all — or if I was so invisible, my blood no longer had color.

Maybe then I could’ve asked if she wanted to walk with me. Maybe then I could’ve known which foods were her favorite. Which patterns she’d have wanted on her skirt. If she liked her own hair or if she wanted to change it. The things she liked about me. The things she didn’t, and never could, and I would go to the home where no one ever really saw me and I would look in the mirror and smell the stink of me, carcass, a thing past due of being loved — even sixteen, as I was, far too old to go unloved by a girl.

I would want to go to lunch with her anyway. I would pretend, pretend that I knew what I was, what I am, that I knew who she was. That there hadn’t been roadkill smashed into our sidewalk, that ants hadn’t clawed up my calves, that these welts didn’t itch, that I hadn’t refused to hold her.

I would pretend for her. Pretend that she would not have looked through me.

It would be the first time I had ever walked with a girl that way, and looking at her, I know sixteen year-old me would have picked her, picked her always. Because I have always loved sweet plainness and sweet and plain, that she was, that she was.

But none of that matters now. She was murdered 60 years ago.

It’s been six years since I first saw her.

Even now as she gazes at me from her photo, her head tipped at me, I tip my head back to her in turn — and my nose burns knowing I could love her, and yet never really loved her at all. And people pass me by and they see right through me, because I am still, still running, an oblong shape that curves past their eyes, and my shaking hands are covering her face and no one sees either of us. And I sink my face into my palms and we meet face-to-face and neither of us sees the other, I see her but she could never see me, and both of us are forgotten.

I think a ghost is anything no one sees, no one touches — and I am not sure who, between us, is doing the haunting.