Ruri Yung would tell her grandchildren of the time she met a ghost. She was about five years old when she saw the ghost. At the time, she was on Earth, homeless and alone along with everyone else. All things considered, they were well off. Her father, Luke Yung II, while a single parent, was able to make life in the ruin calling itself a planet livable. He was a kind man, if somewhat dim. He wasn’t around as often as either would want him to be, mainly to find something, anything to get his family on a new world. But then, what parent doesn’t want better for their children?
Ruri’s grandmother, Sally Yung, had been living on Earth since she was a child. She had seen the stars, but she had never danced with them. She would before the end, and she would feel much regret over not waltzing sooner. Not that her reasons weren’t sympathetic. When a childhood friend and lover has an accident in space, it kind of makes not wanting to go there a bit understandable. She didn’t tell Ruri stories of the girl who was hurt until the day her ghost came along.
They had been dating for a year now. Their first date involved them running from the law over a stolen necklace and a case of mistaken identity. They would laugh and laugh as the cops failed to catch them. The sky was amber and the moon was blue and full. The wind blew with an autumnal chill. The palm trees swayed along the skyline. Their first kiss was beside a statue of a lion made of marble three days later on a cool November evening. The meteors began their descent. They sang Beatles songs as they drunkenly walked home, the long way round. The sky was like a metronome to their song.
When the girl Sally loved, for all intents and purposes, died, Sally could not leave her room. She could not consider loving ever again. Love would require she move, and that’s something she couldn’t do on her own. Her parents forced her out the room, but she was a walking zombie for months. She healed, as everyone does, but it hurt nonetheless. Every once in a while, she would visit the statue of the lion where she knew love for the first time.
She would know love again, meeting men and women alike who made her smile. Some of these loves would be as fleeting as a candle in a hurricane. Others would last long after the relationship ended in tears. Luke’s father, Luke Jones, was a thief on the run. A casually kind fellow who had the tendency to steal from those who were cruel. The Earth wasn’t a ruin quite yet, so there were still some cruel people left over. Most had left to be cruel on some other planet.
It was a mayfly romance that ended in his death three months after their son was born. He was shot up stealing from the last billionaire on Earth. Sally would mourn him and love their child dearly. She cared for him when that woman did something terrible to him. When she found the woman again three years later, dead from an overdose with a child crying in filth, she cared for the child and loved her like she wasn’t born of horrific circumstances. Luke likewise cared for his daughter and loved her dearly. A note of identification claimed her name was Ruri
When she was five years old, Luke had finally gotten enough parts needed to leave the Earth behind for greener pastures. He considered the fields of Mercury or the plains of Orion. They weren’t as expensive to live in as the cities of Mars or as dangerous as the slums of Jupiter. He would ultimately flip a coin to make his decision. His mother, however, single and somewhat alone, was afraid. She would dream of watching her granddaughter’s face crack open as the spaceship collapsed into the vast openness of space. She would think of the girl she loved, who was no more.
Ruri didn’t have these thoughts. She was young and knew the world as something strange and bizarre. So when her grandmother went to the lion statue, sitting in her wheelchair (she was getting quite old) to ponder what to do, Ruri wandered the ruins of Earth. She was sure this place once had a name. Places were supposed to have names according to the old book she read. Maybe this was once London or New York. Only her grandmother would remember, but she would only focus on the unimportant details like the man who gave her a free ice cream cone when she had her heart broken for the fifth time or the street vendor who sold watches whose name she never learned or the man with the moustache who would play the guitar on “that street corner over there.” It would take Ruri years to unlearn that assumption.
In the ruins, she would come across kids who weren’t as well off as her. Unlike her, they didn’t have parents who could provide for them. They were kind kids and would always treat Ruri like one of their own, but they weren’t around at the moment. At the time, they were eating at the orphanage. The ruins of Earth were vast and empty with miles upon miles of desert and nothingness. The city, for lack of a better term. Was one of the few areas left with a little bit of green. It was like a memory of a park dreamt up by a man with Alzheimer’s. It would have been a nice day to go for a walk in that park.
Ruri didn’t remember the full details of what she did in the ruin of a city that day. Its vast architectures were far more memorable than her travels within. There was the tower with no floors and the obelisk drenched in rust and bad dreams. She would make up stories about the people who lived in these ruins. The ghosts who would hover above the floorless building, the men who did business stuff (whatever that was) in the building with broken glass. But one building that caught her imagination most of all was that of the tower through the trees. She never entered that building, not even got close to it. Something about it made her feel unwell, as if it was cursed by some malevolent force. Once, she tried to enter that dark, foreboding tower, but ended up getting lost in the woods, until she found herself back to where she started, the tower eluding her.
(Ruri would find herself in that tower years after her grandmother and father died. She was traveling with her husband and wife, Francis Jones and Martha Klein, as a somewhat nostalgic trip one tends to do when they’re old and want to feel young. The Earth had long since been abandoned in favor of all the other stars in the sky. It was a husk, a shell with nothing to hatch within. The lion statue was rust, soon dust, soon nothing. She wanted to see the tower through the trees. She dreamt of it. Pondered it. Wrote songs about it. There were no more trees, but the tower remained. It was a slab of nothingness jutting out of the Earth like a splinter. The doors were cracked open. A whistle of wind came out of its maw. It was colder in there than outside in the blistering sun. It like staring into the abyss of stars, like a nightmare of falling forever, knowing that at the bottom is a pack of wolves hungry for flesh. As she entered the building, she could see the remains of feral cats once trapped in its decadent interior. There was no change to its insides. It was like a snow globe of frozen time. She climbed the steps and wandered the remains of this ancient fortress. Her eyes glistened by the reflective surface of the glass that cased the building like blood on a serial killer. Eventually, she reached the top. It was a patio, perhaps the last of its kind on Earth. There was green foliage and flowers long thought extinct. And, perhaps most importantly, she could see the world. Not in detail, not the way that mattered. But there was an abstract beauty to seeing the world from above. All the weird shapes and designs made by asteroids and weather satellites told a story of their own. Ruri cried upon remembering all those silly, stupid, amazingly brilliant stories she made up as a kid. When she returned to her loves, tired yet fascinated by the ruin of this empty world, she noticed that the tower was much smaller than she remembered it being. And yet, bigger on the inside. Ruri never returned to the building, or indeed the Earth. Well, except in memory.)
When Ruri returned to her grandmother, she saw that she was talking to a woman. She had violet hair and sad green eyes. She was lean and beautiful in that classical sort of sense. She was wearing a red sweater tied atop a yellow shirt with no sleeves and yellow short shorts. She was pale, yet full of life. With stories left to tell and remembered. She could barely hear what her grandmother was saying at first, only catching, “don’t you remember it” from her grandmother. The woman said something to herself that Ruri couldn’t quite hear.
Ruri ran screaming, “Grandma! Hey, grandma!” When she approached her grandmother and the woman, she whispered to the old woman, “Grandma, we have to go back now.”
“Is it time already,” Sally replied with a false sense of joy. Ruri couldn’t hear this as she was still young and took everything seriously. Besides, she was more transfixed by the woman. It took her a moment to remember that it was rude to stare, and stepped back to bow before this beautiful woman. She didn’t know the feelings that were bubbling inside her. The words weren’t in her vocabulary yet. Not quite love, as she didn’t know the woman. Nor lust, as she wasn’t fully cognizant of her sexual desires. Something more complex and confusing that she couldn’t put into words. Even when she told the story to her grandchildren, Ruri still couldn’t find the words to the emotion.
The woman simply replied with a friendly grunt as the wind slightly blew her violet hair.
“Do you know who this nice lady is?” Sally asked her granddaughter. In truth, Ruri did not know. Sally would do this from time to time when she wanted to introduce someone close to her to the family. Usually, it was a recording from an age of video or a song on the radio she hadn’t heard in a long time. This was the first time she had ever done it to a person. All her friends were dead, as far as Ruri knew. “You’ll never believe it dear, but the fact is she’s…”
“A ghost from beyond,” interrupted the woman with a small, friendly laugh before running off into the distance with a smile, a goodbye, and a small child she grabbed with one arm. Ruri would never see the woman again. Her grandmother, now more comfortable with space travel for reasons Ruri wasn’t quite sure of, would tell her many stories of the ghost. She would tell her that she wasn’t a ghost, but Ruri would always remember her as one. And she would cherish these memories, these fantasies, these stories. The point wasn’t whether or not they were true stories. The point was that she had people to tell them to.
As the stars glistened in the night sky, her grandchildren in bed, Ruri Yung sang a little song to herself, one she didn’t know the lyrics to or even remember the first time she heard it.
Someday, somewhere, somehow,
You’ll love again!
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