Thank you! :D

"Right, okay, so. You're here because—"

"Yes, yes, you don't have to say it."

"Well, I mean. I am your therapist. So I feel a sort of, you know, a certain obligation to—"

"Just fix it. That's what you're paid to do, right? We don't have to talk about it. You don't have to — you know."

"We do have to talk about it. That's how we go about fixing things. Also, I'm dead, so. I don't get paid. So tell me when it started."

It starts when he wakes up floating three inches above his deathbed.

You can duck your head beneath the water for a little while and enjoy the pressure and cold, but at some point you gotta breathe. So what happens when you get stuck down there? No one holds your head — you just can't get back up. Like it's the nature of things.

Acute Corporeal Aversion.

Labeling it doesn't make it any easier.

Cider wakes up freshly dead, an unseen whisper that holds shape, surrounded by weighty solid things. His wife, dripping wet tears onto a thin hospital blanket. His children, shocked and (shockingly) present. A nurse stands in the corner looking painstakingly empathetic while idly picking dirt from beneath her nails.

The room's the reservoir. The people are water. Cider's thin as tracing paper and all this pressure's gonna—

"So you're afraid of people," his ghost-therapist says in that question that isn't really a question way.

"No, I wouldn't ... I mean it's not exactly like I'm scared of them or anything, it's just—" A beat that lasts a decade. His children graduate college. His wife stops dyeing her hair and lets the grey grow out. "—there's all this squeezing, right? Like I'm getting juiced. All these people are so solid, and they breathe and their hearts beat and every time they speak it's like I can feel their throats tighten up, you know? I can feel that tightness and how all that sound just— just vibrates, like it shakes up all the air, and everyone's always talking."

"Okay. Yes, okay, well. This sounds like a classic case of ACA. My suggestion— excuse me, my professional opinion, is that you isolate yourself from corporeal humanity for, let's say, a century." The therapist scribbles nothing into the air with a pale pointer finger. "Go wander the woods, and come back when you feel rested."