Have you ever fallen in love with a figment? It’s a dangerous affair---admiring the whisper of a shadow, obsessing over an echo of a sound that never fully thrived. Love is too unjust as it is, so why add the cruel element of fiction? Such arithmetic only results in hot tears and painfully sleepless nights. Reality seeps into numerous dreams and then numerous dreams seep into reality, rendering a new interpretation of verisimilitude…because a desperate lover’s mind is too easily warped. 

My friend Sabella once decided to marry a ghost. She and her sweetheart were walking along the beach one day when he proposed to her, offering a bright white diamond ring in one hand and a picnic basket in the other. Sabella eagerly accepted and then sat down to a quaint lunch with her ghost. She ignored the fact that she did not know truly him. She ignored the fact that her perception of him wasn’t even real. She would enjoy the day how she wanted and would remember it as she liked. 

Sabella munched on over-salted crackers and chugged cranberry juice with no complaints as she dreamt of her wedding day and beyond: the white drapery, the white cake, the white wine. As she nodded to the images of elegant horse carriages and hundreds of blushing flowers, the jubilant sun and the kind sea breeze assured her that she had found her valiant prince. Sabella would never admit that she always forced the scenes of her life into a plot fit for a fairytale. Besides, nature’s signs never lie, she reasoned. The sun and sea are too good and pure to lie. They are too close to God and too far from sin. 

Of course they lied to the poor bride-to-be this time. 

Sabella woke up one morning after three years of marriage and squinted at her husband, her eyes small as seahorse fins. She contemplated his ears, his eyes, his nose, and his mouth, questioning each and every strand of peach fuzz. Sabella had never before realized how wide the pores on her husband’s forehead were. She had never asked what really lurked behind that hard skull and only assumed that his brain harbored pastel, romantic thoughts. Her glance soon evolved into a stare until her pupils dilated into dark moons. There was a foreign man snoring in her bed, translucent as a phantom. Just yesterday, there had been a man of flesh, bones, and hair---a man she thought she understood. Now she looked upon him and shuddered from the sudden cold that imbued her fingers as she touched his neck.  He was haunted with a strange identity. 

He wasn’t who she thought he was. His cheekbones were less defined than she assumed they were. His eyelashes were longer than she had hoped. His eyes were less blue than she had originally imagined. Sabella noticed that her husband was also curled up in the fetal position, with his lips slightly parted as he dribbled with the fervor of an infant. The man must have been an imposter, a wretched criminal who snuck into her house in the middle of the night, sequestered her husband, and then took his warm spot in bed. 

A second later, Sabella tapped the man on his fuzzy shoulder. No reaction. Then she pinched him. He rustled. Sabella shook him and shook him hard, surprised that her hands didn’t go right through him. The man grumbled loudly, “What? Lemme sleep!” He wiggled back into place and closed his mouth to catch his oozing spit. 

“I did not marry this ghost,” Sabella whispered. “I married a man named Brandon Fisher. He’s 6’3’’ and he likes reading the newspaper every morning just to stay informed because he’s inquisitive that way.” She paused. “Or he tries, anyway. He reads it when I tell him it’s a good idea.” Sabella glimpsed at the newspaper at the door of the master bedroom used to cover a puddle of broken perfume. Brandon had broken the bottle yesterday evening after bumping it off of Sabella’s dresser and then grabbed that day’s newspaper to soak up the spill. 

“He didn’t even read it yesterday,” Sabella sighed and studied Brandon’s supernatural presence. It seemed like that he would disappear if she so much as turned her back. He was already fading in her mind as she told herself that she really didn’t know him.

Sabella forgave Brandon for knocking over her favorite perfume bottle because he had given it to her for their second anniversary, anyway. It was the perfect gift presented at the perfect time, just like in a page out of a storybook. The entire bedroom radiated with gold and purple, and Brandon looked so handsome. Sabella, of course, was wearing a diaphanous empress gown at the moment Brandon presented her with the bottle of heavenly fairy elixir. It was all so beauti---

No, in reality, that was not what had happened. In reality, Brandon came home drunk after dinnertime and entered the house with an incoherent roar. Sabella had been sitting in the living room, flipping through a tabloid when Brandon tossed a magenta bag at her and then flopped his stinky body onto the couch where he slept until 9:30 a.m. the next morning when he woke up and realized that he was late for work. 

Sabella immediately reached inside of the bag and discovered a small, elongated box. It was a pretty shade of blue with bashed corners, indicating that it had been dropped too many times. The disappointed wife shrugged her shoulders, slowly opened the box, and sniffed the bottle of perfume; it smelled like lilacs. After a discreet sprit on the wrists, Sabella, returned the bottle to its box, left the gift bag on her chair, turned off the lamp beside her chair, and left the room to head to bed, not bothering to disturb her husband. The two would sleep separately again, in a nocturnal segregation of the human and the non-human. It was a fairly typical ending to a fairly typical day, despite what Sabella told her friends about her marriage. 

So Brandon was no prince and Sabella was no princess. There had never been any magic between husband and wife, nor would there ever be. Sabella had never known who her husband was and she knew even less so now. She watched her husband twitch his left leg in his sleep on this morning marked by epiphany: there would be no happily-ever-after, only a scary ending to this marriage to a ghost.