Lines used from "When I'm Sixty-Four" by The Beatles:

"Indicate precisely what you mean to say,

yours sincerely, wasting away."

***

High in the tower, Casper always knew that he liked letters better. Because here he was on the phone, while his sister Helena, her daughter and her daughter's wife were sitting around him. Watching. But even more so, he just wished he hadn't woken up that day to his sister screaming her legs and hair off. Because he had turned into a ghost– he was floating and translucent and that had to mean he was a ghost. Next to that of course, there was the woman that had promised him to marry him once he'd turned sixty-four. The problem was, he was still sixty-three, normally speaking he'd turn sixty-four tomorrow. But he had a feeling that was a wish he couldn't get fulfilled any longer.

"No, Casper. Sixty-four precisely. I don't have time for jokes or games. On your birthday tomorrow I'll promise to look if I have two rings for us. But not earlier, why would I? Car accidents happen, you know, and then it'd just be a waste."

He sure prayed he wouldn't end up in a car accident. Not because he'd die, but because he wouldn't die. He'd have to explain to the doctors why he was only slightly bruised. Too much of a hassle.

"But it doesn't really matter now, does it? I don't see why I can't be sixty-three."

The other end of the line sighed.

"And don't say because of the sixty-four pearls on your wedding dress, or how eight times eight are two loops looping into eternity. How that's eternity twice–"

Jasmina tried to interrupt him, but Casper raised his voice.

"...and that would mean a spare eternity for both of us, because you're 64 already. Somehow you think you already have your eternities and you can't share those with me."

"Well no, of course not," Jasmina said jaggedly. "How can you become eternal through someone else? It hardly makes any sense."

Casper held his see-through hand in front of his family sprawled out on the couch. They turned blurry and bland. He thought of what it would be like if Jasmina was here, throwing in her daisy-petaled smile. It made a lot more sense than Jasmina knew.

"It's the one condition I have, it's what I based my entire expectation of my wedding day on. And you promised already! What's the matter all of a sudden?"

His sister and her family sitting on the bench very closely watching him. Say it.

"Well..."

The other end of the phone deadly quiet. Then a bridge snapping loose over a river.

"What's wrong? Is something wrong? Something can't be wrong. Not now."

"My sweet Jasmina..."

The static on the phone line. There never was any static, it must be Jasmina breathing louder.

"You're not amusing me. I swear on my life you're not."

"I know I'm not. No, listen Jasmina– and this is serious, all right."

Heavy-battered weights on tongues on both sides of the phone.

"I've turned into a ghost. I'm really not sure I'll turn sixty-four tomorrow. I fact, I know I won't."

"You've turned into– you're a ghost," she repeated.

Casper fidgeted with the phone cord.

"As in, you will never age again," she said.

"Like that."

He imagined her mouth slightly open, cherry-red. The singular golden tooth peeking out.

"Then we can't get married."

Casper was silent for quite some time.

"What's she saying?" his family asked, biting back expressions of horror. He shushed them.

"Unless you reconsider," he could finally bring out.

"Casper... I don't doubt you're a ghost. You must be serious. Some people turn into vampires, some into musicians, you can't help it."

"Yes. I'm quite serious."

"But unfortunately... Do you believe you'll be a ghost forever?"

"I can't make any predictions, but I expect so, yes."

"Then it seems you will be infinitely eternal. That's more than eight times eight, that's more than sixty-four."

"My sweet Jasmina..."

"And that's not what we had planned. Casper, you know I love you, but..."

He was silent again, waited some more. Nothing came after it.

He clicked shut the receiver.

His niece despaired for him: "It's only to be expected, Uncle Casper. Calling up a woman this late on the eve of her wedding day and telling her you're a ghost..."

"Yes," her wife chimed in. "Ghosts have a bad reputation, I don't blame her thinking she'll get haunted if you marry her."

"She didn't care about me being a ghost. Only about the fact that I can't age anymore."

Casper's niece Agath frowned her eyebrows.

"Why is that?"

"I don't know. She's always been like that. There are a lot of rules she lives by."

His sister Helena shook her head.

"I certainly would have loved an extra resident in this sorry tower."

***

Casper had met Jasmina when he had just started living with his sister. For lack of a better idea, and because she lived in a large tower with a whole mouth of mountains gaping at her every morning when she had tea on the balcony. Casper had always admired his sister's taste for making a house out of a ruin. Helena's husband had passed, she didn't like an empty place, and even with her daughter Agath and spouse Rachel roaming about the sandstone-coloured hallways, they had plenty of room left. So he had accepted the invitation.

He liked the tower. He liked lots of things. More so, he had been sitting around liking things all his life. This year, and that idea. High towers, the ink on letters, and marriage. Only he'd never realised that liking things isn't enough. You need to work with the liking, so to speak. So once he'd made a move into the tower, he was able to look down and finally see things from the inside-out.

What he saw:

That Jasmina was a statue in their garden. Well, not really. She just liked to visit the lush tower garden expanding for miles, and one day she stumbled into Casper like a blister meets a rock. The thing that bound them was not them. In fact, the very thing that made them make any sense was missing. They needed some sort of surface for the blister to occur on, and the rock needed a surface to be of any real use as stone. When they looked into each other's eyes, they felt they needed a reason for why they had met each other. Right now, they only had the faint thought that they were the product and the cause of something.

So Jasmina said:

"I've had a life but now that's overripe and if I eat more from it, I'll get ill."

Casper did not know how to respond to that, so he looked at the cherry tree snowing into Jasmina's greying hair. She frowned.

"You look like you could watch petals falling all your life."

"I like petals a great deal."

He shook a trail of leaves from his head. They had been standing in Autumn for very long before the both of them had dared to utter those thoughts.

"I don't believe we have anything to lose," Jasmina said.

"My sweet Jasmina, I would suggest you indicate precisely what you mean to say."

She fiddled with the watch on her wrist until it sat exactly right.

"How old is eternal, could you say?"

"No."

"Well then, you'll know exactly when we're 64."

Casper didn't want to rehash the explanation of Jasmina's eternities whenever he thought back about this moment. It made him dizzy. 

"Know what?" he asked.

The woman looked up to the tower and saw Agath and Rachel on the balcony, sipping tea. 

"The reason we've met. And consequently, why we should get married."

"Married?"

"I've realised just now. That we have to get married can be the only explanation of us meeting."

In that moment, Casper knew that had to be right. This is what moving into the tower had done for him. He scooped up the petals all around them and rolled them into a make-shift ring.

"My sweet Jasmina, will you marry me?"

"Yes. When we're 64."

Casper trusted Jasmina.

"Then we will."

***

The proposal had been some seasons ago. Now that Casper's plans had been greatly disturbed after the phone conversation, he needed to consult his sister Helena on the balcony. He had an idea he that he needed to get to the bottom of turning into a translucent man overnight to solve this.

"Could it be, Casper, that the stress of the wedding was too much for you?"

"My dear sister, I've been wanting to get married ever since I met Jasmina."

"Well, when my husband died, he didn't turn into a ghost at all. You certainly are a peculiar case."

Casper considered this. He didn't feel all that different as aghost, if anything, merely indifferent.

"I don't believe dying has anything to do with it."

"Right so. That's wonderful, isn't it? That means there is a way to change."

Just then, Agath and Rachel walked out of the tower walls. They sat themselves down on the two remaining seats around the table. 

"Change?" his niece inquired. "Are you going to see Jasmina to change her mind?"

Casper didn't feel up to it. He didn't know what he could say to her.

"Say, dearest niece and niece-in-law–"

"I don't think that's a real word, Casper," Rachel interrupted. Agath chuckled.

"-did you have a heaven-hefty problem about eternity you had to solve before you two got married?"

They both threw a glance at each other, quite speechless.

"Not strictly, no, Uncle. We wanted to live together forever, but– how would you say Rachel..."

The other girl's ring clanged against her teacup as she was lowering it down. She then took it off and laid it on the table before she answered.

"We wanted to get married so we could do things like take off our rings and still be married. Maybe that's a little simple. But I feel like some things should be simple anyhow."

Casper threw his hands up in the air. He could see too much of the blue sky in them, but blue-dull! He had questions to ask the clouds, and for a second it seemed like they came closer to him, connected with him, flowed into him, but that was only an illusion. He was merely a ghost pretending he wasn't one because he didn't know exactly how it felt being one. However, he had to be one. Why else had he told Jasmina that he couldn't age anymore? 

They had made each other a promise that he could live his life towards and not question anything that came in his path, finally. 

Now Jasmina had said he was eternal, infinitely. He supposed that meant that he and Jasmina wouldn't be equal. Since she was only eternal as two eights, as sixty-four. And he had somehow cheated her on that.

Casper ran his hands over the balustrade hanging over the deep green-scented garden. He lived in this tower. To him, it was quite simple. To Jasmina, nothing was. He loved her for that. She made everything sound like a quest, like life had structure, anima, reason.

Well, he would find the reason when they had gotten married, she had said.

It was quite simple.

***

The next morning, as the sun shook itself out of the night and couldn't light Casper because it couldn't see Casper, Casper was still there, with a letter fresh out of the postbox.

"Casper,

I've thought about it some more. I love you! There is not a question about that. I have many things to follow, I know that. But all of the things I do, they are first and foremost very strong hypotheses, believe that. I genuinely put my heart into all of them, how else can the world make any sense? My last life I have lived till the seams burst, all of my hypotheses I suffered through till the very end. I don't know how else to live. And this time, my new life started off so very strong, thanks to you. The promise of eternity! It was all going to align so perfectly.

Then you turned into a ghost.

Casper, I couldn't have predicted that. Not in a million hypotheses I couldn't. You are one special person, and I had one strong conviction. Somehow, loving you only made me want to hold onto this very specific idea more.

That is why I wholly believe you are whatever you are. I can only believe in you, otherwise my whole idea about eternity at 64 would have been an entire farce from the start.

Having said that, I still can't marry you. I don't know how to explain it.

Yours sincerely, 

Wasting away."

Casper put his forearms over the letter. The words blurred slightly. He immediately started on a response.

"My sweet Jasmina,

In some way, shape, or form, it's still the day of my birth today. Let's look for two rings, nothing else for now.

I don't know what else we could do. I like all of you, even if it hurts. The one thing I know however, is that I can't just keep liking. There's something I need to do with it, even if it goes against all reason in your world.

Casper."

***

Shortly after, they did indeed find two rings. They had chosen the garden to meet each other again.

Jasmina looked at Casper level-headed. She wasn't wearing her wedding dress with the 64 pearls. And he wasn't wearing a tuxedo, or well, she wasn't sure entirely. He was quite undefined and rather grey.

"What with the rings now? Are you sure you haven't tricked me into marrying you?" she asked.

"My sweet Jasmina, by your logic, you can't get married to me, as I'm not sixty-four."

Her golden tooth caught the sunlight.

"Right."

"So, imagine we put on the rings. What will happen?"

She looked uneasily to the metal in their palms.

"I haven't the foggiest."

"How about I put on the ring, and you don't? I know you very strongly object to two rings around our fingers, but how can you care about me putting on mine?"

She was silent for a bit.

"I suppose that's not a crime."

So Casper, who almost missed because he couldn't see himself quite well, slid the ring on his own finger.

Jasmina held her breath. She hesitated, then took Casper's ring off for him.

"Why did you do that?" he asked.

"You truly are a very peculiar man. No use wearing that thing before we actually get married now."

Because, as it appeared, Jasmina had slowly watched him turn from a ghost into a man again.

word count: 2350 words