The woman watched her lover’s face as he slept, watched his eyelids twitch and his mouth hang open, looking as peaceful as if he’d died at the happiest moment of his life, and her heart swelled. She loved this man, she was in love with him, she was sure of it. She’d never be the first to say it – he’d say it first, and she’d follow – but she knew, deep down inside, that she was in love with him, and she would do anything for him. Of all of this, she was more certain than she had been of anything. So why, when she was left alone with her thoughts, did she spend so much time unhappy? Why did she worry so much? Why did her love feel laced with regret? 

   This is the bitter thought that gave birth to the frown she wore as she drifted into sleep.

   The next she knew, she was in a concrete desert, nothing natural in sight, except for the steady blanket of heavy rain that fell from the black sky above her. She had no hood, and the thick raindrops soaked through her hair as quickly as it had her clothes, drenching her from head to toe within seconds. The water was cold. Her teeth chattered in time with her kneecaps. She held her upper arms with her hands, looked around her in silence, searching for a sign or a landmark or anything that might place her.

   She found nothing. So she picked a direction, and began to walk.

   Soon enough, a ghost walked with her. It wore the skin of a human, but not its opacity. Light, rain, air all passed through it, as if it wasn’t there at all. But it was there. The woman knew that, and she didn’t mind. She walked with the ghost, and she listened to it speaking.

   ‘Hello,’ it said.

   The woman squinted against the sheet of rain as heavy drops clawed her eyelids downward, kept walking as quickly as she could.

   ‘Where are we?’ She said, feeling like she was shouting over the downpour.

   ‘Where does it feel like we are?’ Said the ghost.

   ‘The future,’ replied the woman, ‘or maybe the past. Anywhere but now.’

   ‘I suppose you’re right. That’s kind of when we are. But not where we are. Where we are is inside of you.’

   ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ the woman said, changing direction slightly so that the rain wouldn’t be blowing directly into her face, only to find that the rain would always change direction with her. ‘Why is it raining so heavily?’

   ‘It’s always raining here. I’ve only seen the sun a few times, locked up in here.’

   The woman let out a short laugh. ‘That doesn’t surprise me too much either.’

   ‘So,’ said the ghost, with a hopeful voice, ‘are you going to fix it?’

   ‘I don’t know if I can,’ she said. ‘Everything is going perfectly. I have every reason to be the happiest I’ve ever been. I don’t know why it’s still raining in here.’

   ‘Something repeats itself in your head. Something is holding you back from feeling that happiness.’

   The woman nodded. Of course the ghost knew, it was a part of her.

   ‘Show me where it is.’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘I want to tear it down.’

   ‘I was hoping you’d say that. We’re nearly there.’

   They walked on in silence, the woman fighting the drops of rain that threatened to crawl up her nostrils and down her throat and into her eyeballs, the ghost just drifting forward, never looking back. It seemed that they could walk forever and never reach anything. Finally, the woman became frustrated with their eternal trek, and stopped dead. ‘I’m sick of this,’ she said, ‘where are we going?’

   ‘We’re there now,’ replied the ghost, who had stopped a few steps ahead, and was now pointing at something behind the woman. ‘There it is.’

   The woman turned to see two black tombstones, each ten feet high, and made of something smooth and reflective as glass or marble. She asked what they were.

   ‘One is your past and future, rolled into one. The other is his.’

   The woman turned back to the ghost. ‘What do you mean?’

   ‘This is why you worry, is it not? This is what you spend your time obsessing over, all that time thinking about. Well now, you can tear it down, and stop this rain.’

   The ghost was right. That niggling feeling at the bottom of the woman’s heart which had been preventing her from feeling all the goodness that her new lover brought was a deep regret, and an infinite fear. She hated the things he’d alluded to about his dark past before her. Thoughts of his exes made her feel sick, and the sexual experiences he might have had outside of those relationships disgusted her. She loathed how careless he sounded, before they’d met. How many bad decisions he’d made, how it seemed like he’d been so much the opposite of the man she’d now fallen in love with.

   But underneath all of that, she hated the things she’d done that might come back to destroy them. The mistakes she’d made with past lovers, the friends she’d always known were mad about her but she’d never had the heart to turn down. She regretted everything about the loves she’d lost and the life she’d wasted, and it terrified her to think that he might learn it all and fall out of love with her, knowing the kind of person she could be when she lost control.

   And because of this, her future was shrouded in darkness. She’d never get over all of this because it’d always be there, hanging over yesterday, threatening tomorrow. There was no way to get rid of her past or his, and that made her sure that their future was doomed.

   Except, now, in this dream, just this once, there was a way to eliminate their pasts. And she wasn’t going to waste the chance.

   ‘Go ahead,’ the ghost said.

   She looked down at her hand, and found it to be filled with the handle of a heavy hammer, its head dragging along the floor at her side. She walked toward the tombstones, and lifted it above her head.

   On impact with the first stone, she knocked off a fist-sized shard which exploded into the air around her, cutting through the rain drops, and she ignored the pain that shot down her arms as best she could. No matter how hard it was going to be, she was going to destroy these blocks. She lifted the hammer again, and proceeded to batter the stone, knocking shards and chunks and lumps into oblivion with all the rage she’d stored up over all those hours of worrying away in the dark. Hitting until she couldn’t hit any more. Then hitting some more.
   Again and again, she hacked away at the past, smashing her mistakes into oblivion, furiously unaware that she was smashing herself too.

   With every blow, the rain grew thinner.

   But so did her skin.

   In fact, it was only when she’d destroyed half of that first ten-foot tall pillar that she noticed that she was turning pale, translucent, becoming a fog that nothing could touch. She panicked, dropped the hammer, and turned back to the ghost with tears in her eyes. ‘What’s happening to me?!’ She asked.

   The ghost approached her, placed its hand on her shoulder.

   ‘Don’t you see? Isn’t it obvious?

   ‘Your past made you who you are. Every single little thing that happened yesterday, the day before, ten years before now, all added up to make you just the person you’ve grown into today. Without your past, you’re not you. Destroy all that, you’ll destroy yourself.’

   The woman slumped to the floor.

   ‘So I can’t do it. I’ll destroy us both.’

   ‘Is there an alternative?’

   The woman began to sob. ‘I don’t know.’

   The ghost raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean… you could, y’know, just accept that the past is passed, and move on. Every day is a new day, and all that.’

   ‘If only I could.’

   ‘What’s stopping you?’

   ‘The things he’s done. He’s made such poor decisions. He’s been such a different person. How can I know that he won’t be like that again? I can’t be in love with people like that.’

   ‘Do you think he would want you if you woke up as who you were at seventeen? At twenty-two? Do you think your past is so much better?’

   ‘No. We all make mistakes, I know. It’s just, people have so much of a harder time forgiving other people’s.’

   ‘Why don’t you give him a chance to try? Why not give yourself a chance too?’

   ‘I have been! And all I do is worry about it!’

   ‘Is the issue here really the things he’s said or done? Is it really the things you’ve said or done? I’d bet it’s neither.’

   The ghost was right. What the woman was really afraid of was having her heart broken. She was afraid that this man might just be pretending to be the man she’d fallen for, and was due to snap back to some imaginary old ways at any moment. She was terrified that who he was when he was young and naïve and stupid was actually who he was underneath, and that that young and stupid boy would come out and rip her heart out without warning. She was scared that everything bad she could ever imagine about the life he had before her would come and destroy her just when she let her guard down, even if it really was just her imagination that created it. 

   ‘What if he feels the same way?’ Asked the ghost. ‘What if he’s just as afraid that your stupid mistakes will come to bite him? What if everyone is trapped in the fear that their hearts will be trampled on, and love is the only answer? Don’t you think that giving in to the love you feel for each other, accepting that everything that came before your meeting was meant to be because without it you wouldn’t be who you are today, would fix all of this?

   ‘Isn’t love enough for you people?

   ‘Jesus.’

   The woman laughed at the ghost’s frustration. It had a point. She’d been so wrapped up in the fear of tomorrow and the shame of yesterday that she’d forgotten to just drink in the joy of today. She was in love with the kindest, gentlest, most attractive man she’d ever met, and he was in love with her. They were happy, and young, and free, and nothing held them back from enjoying that. So why did she worry so much? 

   Well, she didn’t. Not anymore. 

   When she looked up, the sky was blue, and the rain had stopped.

   When she woke, the woman watched her lover’s face as he slept, watched his eyelids twitch and his mouth hang open, looking as peaceful as if he’d died at the happiest moment of his life. Her heart swelled. She loved this man, she was in love with him, she was sure of it. She’d never be the first to say it – he’d say it first, and she’d follow – but she knew, deep inside, that she was in love with him, and she would do anything for him. Of all of this, she was more certain than she had been of anything. When he woke, she would kiss him, and hold him, and never let him go.