Deep blue is the color of those moonlit polar nights, when I lay with my hands flat on the floor, chin on my knees, and let jars and lakes rain inside me. It is again your frozen words that haunt me—those you mumbled that night as we approached that empty little house we found in the middle of a frozen lake.

I could be reborn a thousand winters, anywhere in the world, and still return to the sound of that organ playing itself within those walls—to those echoes that drifted toward us, faint and reverberating, as if they longed to be warped by memory.

I swear I could have counted the ghosts dancing to the organ, if only I had chanted my school Latin backwards loud enough to see well past our realm. I might have even joined them and danced with you, had I ever learned how.

But it was already too late to try on such a journey as ours—one that might have lasted a little longer, had those last words I heard through your frozen lips not shattered the ice beneath us before we could tumble the walls between us.

I could have saved you had I survived you. Now the organ is all I ever hear. And so I count ghosts every day, by whatever light still shines through the ice, waiting for yours to come stay a night or two, and when that happens, I promise I’ll learn how to dance.