I Spend My Spare Time in Cemeteries

“You probably don’t have any desire to go where I’m going,” I said as I gazed down at my hands fumbling over the steering wheel.

“Hell?” he muttered with a slight tinge of seriousness.

I smiled. He wasn’t too far off.

“I’ll race you there,” he shouted from the street as I pulled away.

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I rolled up my car window before he had the chance to kiss me goodbye. I don’t do well with endings. I don’t do well in relationships, either. But it’s little exchanges like these, caught between flirtation and depth that catch me. I retreat. It’s these moments that ruin me. I know the shadow of the woman I can become. I laid her to rest with the last man I allowed to penetrate my mind. But that layer of shedded skin still haunts me from time-to-time.

It’s Sunday morning and one would think I was readying myself for a night on the town. I curl my hair, contour my face, put on my best black dress, and contemplate which pair of heels to wear. I drive through the gate into the city of white soldiers. My music is soft, my windows are down, and I am silent.

I wander through cemeteries in my spare time. I pull up to Section 12, known to me as my grandparents’ address. I step into the ground and my heels sink. I am surrounded by death, and I smile. I slip off my shoes and search for their tombstone. “2086, 2086, 2086.”

My eyes lock and I run. To my surprise, I am followed. A flock of birds hovers above me, and finds a new landing place as I settle before the gravesite. I think nothing of it. I trace my fingers across the white marble and kneel. I lean in and leave red lips next to his name. Silence. I am face-to-face with death. I hold the edge of the tombstone one last time, and wander across to my great-grandparents’ home a few feet away. But I am not alone; the birds follow me. In a setting so filled with death, nature still manages to strike down my spine and remind me I am, indeed, alive.

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It’s a funny thing to walk between life and death. I am dead in so many ways. There are chapters of my life that I have buried. I mourn pieces of myself I wish I wasn’t, fragments of relationships I never had, and the parts of myself that I have yet to encounter. Each day we are closer to death, but to know we are not alone in that fact makes it a bit easier to swallow. The moments I seem to run from, are the very ones that keep blood pumping through my veins.

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“Have any interest in going to Hell?” I ask him after a few glasses of wine.

“I told you I’d meet you there,” he says confidently through a haze of cigarette smoke.

I remain silent and hand him a crumpled piece of paper. That’s something else I do at cemeteries. I write. I reflect. I become.

Burial

“Layers of dust circled

her body, cemented

her lips. She was a tomb-

stone. She hoped someone would

visit her grave and leave white

roses by her plot. She wanted to be written

into newspaper memories and threaded through

erotic dreams. She couldn’t bear the thundering

of the shadows above her shrine.”

We’re both silent for a while. Sips of cabernet echo into or glasses. Fireflies twinkle in front of my nose.

“When do we leave?” He asks.