I haven’t left this house in years. After five, I stopped counting. I discontinued my tallies on the walls when I ran out of space, when I thought that the scratches from furniture on the floorboards might confuse my system that began the moment I mysteriously arrived here. All I remember is that one day I woke up to an unfamiliar home, one with four walls, one couch and two chairs, one average sized table, and no doors. There’s only one window. One tiny square window that lets in enough sunlight to warm my frigid heart up twice a day, keeping it beating steadily.

 

Or so I presumed.

 

Light peaks through once as the sun rises and once as it slips beyond the horizon, welcoming the distant, cold moon, one of the many things I despise alongside the night. I hate the night. I absolutely do. I loathe the dark with my entire being, which might explain my detest for the night. But what’s worse is that I’m afraid of it all, too. Because there’s no escaping it.

 

As I learned over the years spent here in isolation from whatever may be outside these walls, the dark is a warden and I’m the wrongly accused prisoner. I have committed no crimes and yet I’m held hostage routinely by an inevitable phenomenon. It cares for no one. It protects no one. No one is safe when darkness is around.

 

And with darkness comes the untrustworthy moon.

 

The moon hides things whereas the sun brings it all to attention. The sun may cast shadows, but it doesn’t have any of its own. The moon’s craters keep secrets locked away for eternities. The moon comes and goes in cycles, waning and waxing, then disappearing for a moment only to return once again. It may be predictable, but it’s dangerous.

 

Who knows what happens when it turns its back on the world, on the rest of us?

 

The moon cannot be trusted. It turns a demonic red and other unnatural colors throughout the years. It makes me uncomfortable. 

 

Unlike the moon, the sun is a friend.

 

It is reliable. It rises and sets at approximately the same time, only changing schedules as the seasons change. The sun takes a longer break during the winter when bears and other animals beg for a long nap, and it works longer shifts during the summer when the small humans ask for time to play during their time off of school.

 

The sun has kept me company for as long as I have been confined in this prison I currently reside in.

 

___

 

Am I dead?

 

I’m not so sure. I don’t have any memories of being alive, but I also can’t be sure that I even exist in the first place.

 

There’s nothing beyond these walls from what I understand. The sun and the dreadful moon are what’s keeping my sanity in check. Without them—even the damned moon—my existence might even be compromised. There’s no limit to the possibilities surrounding when my only source of the outside world—if there is one—is a small square window.

 

But I digress. My imagination can sometimes run wild. It happens quite often in a colorless room such as this, void of stimulus.

 

Sometimes I would much rather be dead. There was once a ghost who passed through here ages ago. (Ages being a hyperbole and the only way I can express the amount of time without valued numbers—things I don’t have anymore.) I think he went by the name of Xiumin. I don’t really remember.

 

At the time, he would hang around like old ghosts do. He tried the haunting thing, but I guess it never really worked out for him. Humans weren’t scared or intimidated by him when he granted them the opportunity to actually see him. His face gave the opposite effect than what a normal ghost would like.

 

All Xiumin—let’s just say that’s his name—ever wanted was to successfully haunt a human. So he came here, thinking that I—I didn’t have a name at the time—was human. But how can I be human when I don’t eat food. How can I be living when I don’t age—at least I don’t think I do—and I don’t get injured.

 

I don’t even sleep. Yet another reason to hate the night.

 

It keeps me trapped here in my boredom and presumable loneliness. It makes it much more difficult to see anything. And most importantly, it took Xiumin, my only companion I dare call my friend, away from me.

 

____

 

It was during my fourth year here that Xiumin floated into this house through one of the walls. Before then, I had never considered exiting that way, so I tried. He attempted to teach me how to be ghost-like and seep through objects and walls. The lessons only ended with me breaking one of the two chairs. It still rests by the table, legless and pitiful.

 

He laughed musically at my failures and I can still feel his sound resonating in my cold, possibly dead shell of a body. I would say soul, but that might be what I am—a stray soul that can’t find its way back. Xiumin proposed that idea to me. (“Well, you love basking in the bits of sun that enter the house, so you’re definitely not a vampire. Maybe you’re just a lost soul,” he would say.) Throughout his many attempts to haunt various humans, he would learn more and more about spiritual beings and others from those who tried to summon him using ouija boards or whatever they’re called. 

 

Xiumin said that those humans were the most powerful because they were surrounded by so many souls—not quite human but also not quite dead beings. And definitely not supernatural like vampires, werewolves, or those types of creatures. So when he suggested that I may be a lost soul, like the ones surrounding the spirit-loving humans, I only scoffed out loud but definitely considered the thought.

 

The only problem with Xiumin’s idea was that we didn’t know what I needed in order to pass on and why I was trapped in this specific location. He tried to make me rack my brain for possible regrets or last wishes only to come up short for answers because I have no memories preceding my entrapment.

 

“I just appeared here one day and stopped keeping track of the time after five years of no escape,” I explained to him one day after he told me some stories about others who were stuck in limbo between life and death—literally.

 

“But why do you think you started counting the days immediately upon your arrival? Could that indicate anything about your life before here?” He suggested, tracing my scratched walls with his pale, translucent fingertips. He dropped his hand and a slight hint of solemness flashed across his face. “Hell, I can’t even feel it. Why do I even try,” he whispered.

 

“I have no idea,” I responded honestly, noticing his sudden shift in mood. I crossed the small room and stood behind him, overlapping his arm with mine. I raised our hands and felt the wall. “For some reason, you can feel me. If I do this, can you feel the marks, too?”

 

Xiumin turned his head to face me. He smiled softly and tilted his head. “Yeah. Strange, isn’t it?”

 

For the first time in my conscious existence, I felt a warmth spread throughout me with more delicacy than the sun’s golden rays. From that point on, that troublesome ghost became my sun. 

 

But, of course, when the night comes, the sun goes away.

 

And that’s just what Xiumin did.

 

___

 

After his disappearance, the nights grew longer again. The house was cold, even though I was indifferent to temperature, and I felt lonely for once, something that never happened to me before.

 

The days were darker, as I assumed clouds covered my precious sun. And since that ghost was the only source of sound in this dreadful place, the silence grew unbearably thick. I couldn’t breathe, it was dark, cold, and suffocating.

 

I suffered through the changes of the seasons until the trusted sun returned to its radiant summer self. It conquered the days for longer periods than the horrible moon. The house warmed a bit but not enough.

 

Once I tasted true warmth, just the sun alone wasn’t enough. I felt even more trapped in that false sense of security. 

 

But over time, Xiumin became a thing of the past, a fond memory for me to look back on. I hope he was able to find someone to haunt with menace, or even pass on and be reborn as he always said would happen.

 

That ghost had so much knowledge of the world and nurtured a lost boy like me. Though our time together was brief, I feel as if I lived on the outside for at least a portion of my existence. Feeling less trapped, I often forgot the moon.

 

With him, I felt the sun’s warmth even when the moon reflected annoyingly brightly in the sky.

 

With him, I felt reborn for quite some time.

 

___

 

“Chen. That’s what we should call you,” Xiumin said matter-of-factly as he entered the small house a long time ago. 

 

I looked at him questionably, obviously not understanding what he meant.

 

“You know my name, but we don’t know yours. So I’m giving you one, okay, Chen?” He smiled sweetly at me, who just stood there staring at the ghost as if I had never seen one before.

 

“But why that name?” I couldn’t help but wonder.

 

He just chuckled in response. “Because I heard it’s a very generic name in some places. Look, Chen. I went through so much trouble the past few days trying to find you a name. I asked the other ghosts in the area and none of them were of any help. They just suggested the worst names possible. So then I went to China.”

 

I had to interrupt. “You went to China?” I asked, even though I didn’t know what a China was, and even if it was a place, I didn’t know where I was, so none of that information would be useful.

 

Xiumin just nodded as if it was nothing. “Yeah, yeah. I just kinda floated over there. You know, ghost things. But regardless, I went there and there were lots of people saying that name. I thought it was pretty and suited you. So I’m naming you Chen. Got that, Chen?”

 

I couldn’t think of any response—approval or not—but I felt myself nodding slowly, accepting a name gratefully. Especially a name that was chosen by that ghost. That ghost that changed so much without me noticing until he was no longer with me.

 

___

 

Angel. From what he had told me about angels, demons, and other beings of the like, I would rather imagine Xiumin as an angel than as a ghost. I want to believe that he was created to bring light to others like he did me. I want to think that he wasn’t a human who ended up passing away in some gruesome way that caused his spirit to remain tied to the earth by chains around his ankles.

 

I want nothing more than to be told that Xiumin was the angel who was sent from wherever angels come from just to save me from my lonely, isolated existence. Before Xiumin, I just existed. After meeting him, I lived.

 

I’d never felt more alive than I did when I was in the company of him.

 

So now I just sit at the empty table, which I placed strategically to catch as much sun as possible, in the middle of the room. I wait for his return. I don’t beg for him to come back to me. I just wait patiently.

 

Having this on my mind is at least better than the thoughts of the passing time and my inability to leave forever. 

 

Somewhere deep inside, I know he’ll be here someday. He must be lost. He must be waiting for me to leave and go find him somewhere far away from here.

 

I know he can’t just abandon me.

 

So while I wait, I befriend the moon.