Vanjonack's Out of Body Depicts Ghost Watching Ex-Girlfriend Date

The patio lights at the restaurant buzz with a low, electric hum. Sol laughs, her voice cutting through the noise as she tells her date about a road trip to Portland. Her eyes are bright, animated, and completely unaware of the man sitting rigid in the chair next to her. He is well-dressed but bland, checking his phone and clearing his throat like a statue stuck in a loop. He has no idea he is sharing the table with the dead.

This is the premise of Out of Body, a new book by Chris Vanjonack, featured this week in the Colorado Sun’s SunLit series. The story follows a ghost who checks in on his former girlfriend, Sol, from the afterlife. It is a quiet, eerie look at what happens when one person dies and the other keeps living, dating, and planning trips to meet pen pals.

The ghost is not a spook. He is an observer. He watches Sol argue with her date about the safety of meeting online friends. He watches her fiddle with Google Maps for a nineteen-hour drive. He knows she is leaving at 5 a.m. in three weeks to meet Brian, a man she has only ever known through emails and video chats since her teenage years. The ghost knows these details because he is looking over her shoulder. He admits in the text that he is "still not sure if this is a violation."

The tension between them was never just about romance. It was ideological. Sol, when drunk, claimed that Stanley Kubrick staged the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing on a soundstage in Huntsville, Alabama. She believed in science, climate change, and vaccinations, but not that first step on the moon. The ghost, who died in an electrical storm a few weeks before this scene takes place, used to fight her on it. He called her thinking "philosophical divides." She called his certainty about the afterlife a blind spot.

"How can you be so sure that nothing happens when we die?" she asked him before the storm. "That there are no such things as soulmates? That our spirits aren’t recycled?"

He didn't have an answer then. He does now, in a way. He is here. He is watching her date clear his throat every time she makes a joke. The date says, "You’d better be careful. You hear stories about this kind of thing." Sol gets hurt. Her voice rises, the same way it did during their fights about Christmas or conspiracy theories. She defends Brian with logic: they have video chatted a hundred times. They follow each other online. Pictures of roller coasters are tagged in their feeds. It is hard to bullshit that level of connection.

The ghost sits in the background, a spectator to her life’s next chapter. He is not trying to scare her. He is not trying to stop the trip. He is just there, a little man who stepped foot on an astronomical body in his own life, now watching another woman step into the unknown.

The book is part of a weekly feature by The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center for the Book, which highlights excerpts from Colorado books and interviews with authors. For readers in the valley, it offers a strange comfort. We all know people who are gone but still feel present in the empty chairs at dinner tables or the silence on a phone line. Vanjonack captures that specific, hollow weight of absence without turning it into a horror story. It is just life, continuing around the edges of death.

Sol will drive to Portland in three weeks. She will meet Brian. The ghost will watch from the patio, or maybe from the car, or maybe from the air itself. He doesn't say where he goes when she leaves. He just says, "In retrospect, I mean, fuck."

That is the whole book in one sentence. The uncertainty of existence, wrapped in a relationship that ended not with a breakup, but with a storm.