okok so Henry Winter who is stuck in his old empty ass apartment as a ghost, and he just wanders about as all of the empty mantles and the counters collect dust, and all his possessions that his mother and father did not take back remains in a small box in the closet (books, extra pairs of things, ties, his gardening tools).
Henry who’s thinking so deeply about his life, and his actions, his choices, the things he longs for most (maybe he even begins to regret the way things turned out, and sees everything in a different light??) until one day the front door bursts open, and obviously who would come back here after the rumours in Hampden College if not his old friends? Camilla? Richard? Francis?
But no, it’s a freshman in ‘vintage clothing’ which is just a dress from the seventies and surprisingly enough the same hairdo that he saw most commonly at Hampden (he doesn’t know it’s the 2000’s now), she’s carrying two large bags, and there’s a truck outside ready to take some stuff in, and she settles inside really quickly unlike he had when he first arrived. He disappears for maybe a few days, passing like the wind and when he comes back there is not a single monogram item or piece of furniture . The walls are still white, maybe not for long but then he learns there is a landlord after overhearing her speaking into a glowing little case that flips open. So most things are kept the same and he can hear the girl speaking to her friends about how the place really isn’t haunted, and how she hasn’t seen anything, but every single time he passes through to a room his already poor sight is tortured by bright pinks and greens and blues and whatever else there is.
Annoying pop music with instruments he had never even heard before blasts every morning through a radio, and all sorts of interesting things reside in the fridge, fruits and caffeinated drinks and random mixtures. He moves a chair slightly when he sits on it, or he brushes past a lit candle and the flame goes out and she doesn’t seem to think that he is there, blaming it on possible outcomes or just waving it off. He soon learns that her name is Katherine, and is a (now confirmed) fashion student, most of her sketches are inspired by fashion from the sixties to the eighties.
This is his worst nightmare, and he can’t even escape it because his apartment is a semi-purgatory for him.
But then a month passes and he begins to get used to it, mainly lingering about the empty closet and walking around when the suspected fashion major isn’t home. Two months go by and, having grown a little more comfortable, he finds himself letting his curiosity lead him to what used to be his former room to find Katherine sitting on her bed reading, or snoring into a pillow, or annotating a magazine that somehow encapsulates the entire place into three pages.
After a few months, he thinks that this is how it is going to be until she moves out. Lingering at the sidelines, in the unused closet, waiting for this fashion major to leave until one morning he’s caught in her kitchen, for some reason now she can see him, and she freaks out. I might write about that later.
